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THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE 
ENGLISH NOVEL 



:V><^° 



THE DEVELOPMENT 



OF 



THE ENGLISH NOVEL, 



BY 



WILBUR L. CROSS 

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN THK 

SHEFFIELD SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL 

OF YALE UNIVERSITY 



Nebj f orlt 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY J 

LONDON I MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.^ 
1900. 

All righU reserved 



PHZ2 



COPTBIGHT, 1899, 

By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and clectrotyped July, 1899. Reprinted December, 
1899; October, 1900. 



48 6555 

JUL 2 3 1942 



,.i- 



>\'> 






NorfajODtJ ^vesa 

J. 8. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



TO 
M. FERDINAND BRUNETI^RE 

IS INSCRIBED 

BY THE AUTHOR 



NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION 

Whatever may be the value of the opinions ex- 
pressed in this book, I have spared no pains to be 
accurate in all statements of fact. The interim be- 
tween the first and the second impression has been 
hardly long enough for the discovery of all errors 
that are sure to creep into a book of this kind. A 
few, however, have been observed, and are now cor- 
rected. They occurred on pages 12, 29, 40, 66, 283, 
and 289. Undoubtedly there are others; and that 
they may be eliminated, I invite the cooperation of 
my readers. 



THE AUTHOR. 



Yale University, 
Nov. 13, 1899. 



CONTENTS 



PAQB 

Introduction xi 



CHAPTER I 
From Arthurian Romance to Richardson 

SECT. 

1. The Mediaeval Romancers and Story-tellers ... 1 

2. The Spanish Influence 6 

8. The Elizabethans 10 

4. The Historical Allegory and the French Influence . 13 

5. The Restoration 18 

6. Literary Forms that contributed to the Novel . . 22 

7. The Passing of the Old Romance .... 25 

8. Daniel Defoe 27 

CHAPTER II 
The Eighteenth-century Realists 

1. Samuel Richardson 31 

2. Henry Fielding 42 

3. The Novel versus the Drama 57 

4. Tobias Smollett 63 

5. Laurence Sterne 69 

6. The Minor Novelists : Sarah Fielding, Samuel John- 

son, Oliver Goldsmith 76 

vii 



VIU CONTENTS 

CHAPTER III 
From ' Humphry Clinker ' to ' Waverley ' 

6E0T. PAGB 

1. The Imitators 82 

2. The Novel of Purpose 84 

3. The Light Transcript of Contemporary Manners . 93 

4. The Gothic Romance 98 

5. The Historical Romance 110 

6. Jane Austen — the Critic of Romance and of Manners 114 

CHAPTER IV 
Nineteenth-century Romance 

1. Sir Walter Scott and the Historical Novel . . . 125 

2. Scott's Legacy 136 

3. The Romance of War 149 

4. James Fenimore Cooper and the Romance of the 

Forest and the Sea 150 

5. The Renovation of Gothic Romance .... 168 

CHAPTER V 
The Realistic Reaction 

1. The Minor Humorists and the Author of ' Pickwick ' 168 

2. Charles Dickens and the Humanitarian Novel . . 180 

CHAPTER VI 
The Return to Realism 

1. William Makepeace Thackeray 197 

2. Bulwer-Lytton in the R61e of Realist, George Borrow, 

Charles Reade 208 



CONTENTS IX 

SECT. PAGB 

3. Anthony TroUope 215 

4. Charlotte Bronte 224 

CHAPTER Vn 
The Psychological Novel 

1. Elizabeth Gaskell — the Ethical Formula of the Psy- 

chologists 234 

2. George Eliot 237 

3. George Meredith 252 

CHAPTER VIII 
The Contemporary Novel 

1. Henry James and Impressionism .... 263 

2. Philosophical Realism : Mrs. Humplny Ward and 

Thomas Hardy 268 

3. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Revival of Romance 280 

4. Rudyard Kipling 290 

Conclusion 293 



APPENDIX 



1. A List of Twenty-five Prose Fictions . . . .297 

2. Bibliographical and Other Notes 300 

Index 315 



INTRODUCTION 

This book aims to trace in outline tlie course of 
English fiction from Arthurian romance to Steven- 
son, and to indicate, especially in the earlier chapters, 
Continental sources and tributaries. I hope that the 
volume may be of service to the student as a prelimi- 
nary to detailed investigation in special epochs ; and 
of interest to the general reader, who may wish to 
follow some of the more important steps whereby a 
fascinating literary form has become what it is through 
modifications in structure and content. 

The apparent law that has governed these changes 
is the same as is operative in all literary development : 
the principle of action and reaction in the ordinary 
acceptation of the terms. This law has a psychologi- 
cal basis. We are by nature both realists and ideal- 
ists, delighting in the long run about equally in the 
representation of life somewhat as it is and as it is 
dreamed to be. There is accordingly no time in 
which art does not to some extent minister to both 
instincts of human nature. But in one period the 
ideal is in ascendency; in another the real. Why 
this is so we have not far to seek. Idealism in course 
of time falls into unendurable exorbitancies ; realism 
likewise offends by its brutality and cynicism. And 
in either case there is a recoil, often accompanied, as 



XU INTRODUCTION 

will be noted, by unreasonable criticism, even by 
parody and burlesque. The reaction of the public is 
taken advantage of by a man of letters ; it is enforced 
by him and may be led by him. Fielding was such a 
man, and so was Thackeray. And if, as was true in 
these two cases, the leader is a man of genius, he can 
for a period do what he pleases with his public. Now 
what is the procedure of the man of letters who has 
assented to a reactionary creed ? He reverts to some 
earlier form or method, and modifies and develops it ; 
in the language of science, he varies the type. Not 
to go for illustration beyond the two novelists just 
cited. Fielding set the Spanish rogue story over against 
Eichardson ; and Thackeray professedly took Fielding 
as his model in his reaction against Dickens. Both 
were, according to their light, realists; but their 
works are different. No one would confound the au- 
thorship of ' Tom Jones ' with that of ^ Vanity Fair.' 
Why ? Besides the strictly personal element, there 
are differences in literary antecedents and divergences 
in public taste. For realism. Fielding had behind 
him, for the most part, only picaresque fiction and 
the comedy of manners. Thackeray had behind him 
not only Fielding, but a line of succeeding novel- 
ists — romancers and realists. For example, between 
Fielding and Thackeray is Scott; and with what 
result? There is no history in 'Tom Jones'; if 
'Vanity Fair' does not have a background in actual 
historical incident, it has at least the show of his- 
tory. There is thus never a full return to the past ; 
romance learns from realism ; and realism learns from 
romance. In this way literature is always moving on, 
and to something that can never be predicted. In the 



LNTRODUCTION xiii 

details of my work, in determining the antecedents 
of a writer and what he added that is new and origi- 
nal in form and content to the art of fiction, I have 
found that there are modes or processes of change 
and development best expressed in the terms that 
natural science has made familiar, — modification, 
variation, deviation, persistence, and transformation. 
These are perhaps only analogies. That the material 
of literary history can be treated with the exactness 
of science I have, after some experimenting, no dispo- 
sition to maintain. 

The terms 'romance' and 'novel,' which in them- 
selves are a summary of the two conflicting aims in 
fiction, require at the outset brief historical and de- 
scriptive definition. The former is in English the 
older word, being in common use as early as the 
fourteenth century. Our writers then meant first of 
all by the romance a highly idealized verse-narrative 
of adventure or love translated from the French, that 
is, from a romance language; they also extended the 
term to similar stories derived from classic and other 
sources, or of their own invention. For a verse- 
narrative approaching closer to the manners of real 
life — its intrigues and jealousies, — the Provenqal 
poets had employed the word novas (always plural) ; 
for a like narrative in prose, always short, Boccaccio 
and his contemporaries were using the cognate word 
novella. Of stories of this realistic content, many 
were written in English in the fourteenth century, 
but they were called tales, — a word of elastic con- 
notation, which Chaucer made to comprehend nearly 
all the different kinds of verse-stories current in his 
time. 



XIV INTRODUCTION 

During the two centuries following Boccaccio the 
Italians continued to compose books of novelle, and in 
very great numbers. In the age of Elizabeth they 
came into English in shoals, and with them the word 
^ novel/ as applicable to either the translation or an 
imitation. It was a particularly felicitous make-believe 
designation, for it conveyed the notion that the inci- 
dents and the treatment were new. It however had 
a hard struggle to maintain itself, for the Elizabethans 
preferred to it the word ' history,' which they applied 
to all manner of fictions in verse and prose, as may 
be seen from such titles as ' The Tragical History of 
E/Omeus and Juliet' and ^The History of Hamlet, 
Prince of Denmark.' This, too, was a happy desig- 
nation, for it implied a pretended faithfulness to 
fact. Richardson and Fielding, after some vacilla- 
tion, settled upon the word ' history ' for their fictions, 
though they both refer to them as novels. From the 
invention of printing down to this time the word 
^romance,' by which our mediaeval writers denoted ad- 
ventures in verse or in prose, had not been common 
in the titles and the prefaces of English fictions, 
though many romances had been written. But when 
in the last half of the eighteenth century wild and 
supernatural stories came into fashion, the word was 
often placed upon title-pages. At this time Clara 
Beeve, in an exceedingly pleasant group of dialogues, 
drew the line of distinction between the romance and 
the novel. She says in ^The Progress of Romance' 
(1785) : — 

The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of 
the times in which it is written. The Romance, in lofty 



INTRODUCTION XV 

and elevated language, describes what never happened nor 
is likely to happen. The Novel gives a familiar relation of 
such things as pass every day before our eyes, such as may 
happen to our friend or to ourselves ; and the perfection of 
it is to represent every scene in so easy and natural a man- 
ner and to make them appear so probable as to deceive us 
into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is 
real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses of the 
persons in the story as if they were our own. 

Scott was a disturbing element to the critic's classi- 
fication, for he combined the novel and the romance 
as defined by Clara Reeve. What name shall the 
amalgamation bear? It was at this time that the 
word ^ novel' became the generic term for English 
prose fiction. But while this is mainly true, our no- 
menclature continues somewhat uncertain. In a not 
very precise way the novel and the romance are still 
brought into an antithesis similar to Clara Reeve's. 
That prose-fiction which deals realistically with actual 
life is called, in criticism and conversation, preemi- 
nently the novel. That prose-fiction which deals with 
life in a false or a fantastic manner, or represents it 
in the setting of strange, improbable, or impossible 
adventures, or idealizes the virtues and the vices of 
human nature, is called romance. 

The expression 'the English novel,' in common 
speech, means the novel written in Great Britain. 
For reasons that will appear very obvious, I shall 
regard the novel written in the United States as a 
constituent part of English fiction. 

All dates placed in parentheses after novels are of 
publication. Where a novel has appeared as a serial 
and afterward as a whole the date of the latter pub- 



xvi INTRODUCTION 

lication is given, unless an express statement is made 
to the contrary. Such a date as 1871-72 for 'Mid- 
dlemarch' means that the novel was published in 
parts during those years. Title-pages in most in- 
stances are of necessity much abridged. Immediately 
after the main text I have placed a list of twenty- 
five novels which will show the general progress of 
English fiction. This in turn is followed by biblio- 
graphical and other notes for the use of more advanced 
students. In both instances I have indicated recent 
editions available to those who do not have easy access 
to large libraries. 

It would be impracticable to enumerate here the 
sources drawn upon for this volume. J. C. Dun- 
lop's ^ History of Prose Fiction ' and Professor Walter 
Raleigh's ^ English Novel ' should be expressly men- 
tioned, for, in guiding my reading down to Scott, they 
were of great aid. Though I cannot hope to have 
detached myself from opinions and estimates now 
prevailing, I have striven to gain a new standpoint ; 
consulting to this end, from Scott onward, current 
reviews of novels as they were appearing. As so little 
has been attempted thus far in the history of the 
English novel, I have been able to present in outline 
considerable new material : the far-reaching influence 
of Spanish fiction from Fielding to Thackeray; the 
historical romance as an offshoot of the historical 
allegory; the relation of Richardson and Fielding to 
the drama; the beginnings of the Gothic romance in 
Smollett ; and the immediate source of George Eliot's 
ethical formula. Access to the library of the British 
Museum has also enabled me to put the origin of the 
novel of letters in a new light. What has most im- 



INTRODUCTION Xvii 

pressed me is the intimate connection between English 
and French fiction. This might be expected in the 
centuries immediately following the Norman Con- 
quest. The relationship, however, is very close from 
Eichardson to Hardy. So far as I have been able I 
have given organic treatment to my subject. The 
book is not a series of independent essays, but one 
essay, divided here and there for convenience. 

While the volume has been passing through the 
press, I have received much aid from two students 
in the graduate department of the University, — Mr. 
A. H. Bartlett and Mr. J. M. Berdan. To Professor 
Charles Sears Baldwin, who has read all the proof- 
sheets, I am greatly indebted for unsparing criticism. 
I have also to thank Professor Henry A. Beers for the 
encouragement he has given me from the beginning 
of the work to its publication. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE 
ENGLISH NOVEL 

CHAPTER I 

From Arthurian Eomance to Richardson 

1. The Mediaeval Romancers and Story-tellers 

Norman England came into possession of an im- 
mense body of fictitious narrative. Learned societies 
have edited and published some of it, but there still 
remain unedited hundreds of manuscripts, for a 
knowledge of which we are compelled to have recourse 
to imperfect bibliographies. The heroes of these tales 
were taken from Teutonic, Celtic, French, Classic, 
and Eastern tradition. It was especially around 
Charlemagne, Arthur, Alexander the Great, and the 
siege of Troy, that epic and mythological incident 
gathered, assuming the form of histories and biogra- 
phies, now called cycles of romance. On their appear- 
ance first in French and then in English, these adven- 
tures were usually in verse, composed by minstrels 
and trouveres for recitation and reading at court and 
in the castles of the nobility ; later they were turned 
into prose. First in popularity and first in interest 
to him who is seeking the antecedents of the modern 
novel are the legends of King Arthur and the Round 

B I 



2 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Table ; the scope of which is represented, though not in 
its fulness, by Tennyson's ^Idylls of the King.' As 
early as 1139, there was circulating a curious hero- 
saga, written in Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth and 
professing to be a translation from the Welsh. This 
famous 'History of the British Kings,' reflecting 
vaguely the struggles of Eoman, Celt, and Saxon for 
supremacy in Britain, becomes in its later parts a 
splendid romance of Arthur's ancestry, marriage, corona- 
tion, conquests, and passage to Avallon to be healed of 
his wounds. This so-called ' Celtic matter ' proved most 
attractive to the French and Anglo-Norman poets, who 
reared upon it a vast superstructure. Thus, as might 
be illustrated by many similar examples,^ fiction freed 
itself from the restraint of fact, and the romance came 
into being. Long after this event had taken place, a 
certain Sir Thomas Malory made a graceful redaction 
of the stories about Arthur and his knights in a book 
entitled ' Morte Darthur ' (1485), which is for the gen- 
eral reader the first easily accessible prose romance in 
English. 

The Arthurian romances do not consist merely of 
improbable adventures. It is true that they sought 
to interest, and did interest, by a free employment of 
the marvellous, fierce encounters of knights, fights 
with giants" and dragons, swords that would not out 
of their scabbards, and the enchantments of Merlin. 
But these romances were also analytical. In those 
brilliant assemblages of lords and ladies at the Nor- 
man and French courts of the twelfth century, con- 
versation turned for subject to the nature of love, 
and the proper conduct of the lover toward his mis- 

1 'Epic and Komance,' W. P. Ker, Lond. and N.Y., 1897. 



FROM ARTHURIAN ROMANCE TO RICHARDSON 3 

tress ; and, as a result, the courtly philosophers, work- 
ing on Ovid's ' Art of Love ' as a basis, formulated a 
code of passion which rivalled, in minute detail, the 
metaphysical distinctions of the Schoolmen. There 
were major precepts and minor precepts, showing the 
processes by which a knight might win the heart of 
the lady of the castle; the symptoms of love were 
noted and recorded, and nice questions of conduct 
— for example, the circumstances under which the 
lady might become ^ the fair dear friend ' of a knight 
not her husband — were put into syllogistic form. 
This casuistry is the basis of the stories of Tristram 
and Iseult, and of Lancelot and Guenevere.^ Other 
conceptions of passion also found their way into 
Arthurian romance : in Cameliard, Arthur had the 
first sight of Guenevere, and ever after he loved her ; 
the fair maid of Astolat swooned and died when 
abandoned by Lancelot of the Lake; and in course 
of time, the ethics of the court clashing with the 
ethics of the cloister, there was conceived Sir Gala- 
had's quest of the Holy Grail. This formal analy- 
sis of love winds its way through Spanish, French, 
and English romance down to the eighteenth century ; 
and becomes in Richardson a starting-point for a less 
scholastic dissection of the heart. The main situations 
in the great stories of Arthurian romance in which 
one is asked to sympathize with guilty passion have 
appeared again and again in the modern novel. Lance- 
lot and Guenevere, Tristram and Iseult, have proved 
to be permanent types. 

Side by side with the Arthurian cycle, though 
the period of their popularity was somewhat later, 

1 'Romania,' xii. 516-534. 



4 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

were the verse-tales called by the French, who first 
composed them, romances of adventure. Some of 
them, as the English alliterative poem ^ Gawain and 
the Green Knight,' are Celtic in incident. Others are 
episodes of the Charlemagne cycle. Still others, in- 
distinct echoes of Greek and far Eastern fable, are 
throughout professedly fictitious, and thus have an 
important significance. Eiction is expanding and tak- 
ing a step toward the freedom of the modern novel. 
Its ethics are also undergoing change ; for the exalta- 
tion of illegitimate passion or of asceticism is not so 
frequent as in Arthurian romance. The prevailing 
theme is now the constancy of young lovers, separ 
rated by accident or design, and united after ship- 
wreck, capture by pirates, and servitude. Beautiful 
renderings of this situation are ' Florice and Blanche- 
flour,' and the story of Aucassin, who for his 
love of Nicolette would sacrifice his kingdom, his 
knighthood, and Paradise.^ As verse-tales the ro- 
mances of adventure disappeared toward the close 
of the fourteenth century, when Chaucer in ^The 
Eime of Sir Thopas ' ridiculed them as undeservedly 
as delightfully. But their incidents in many cases 
survived the wreck of their form. There were Tudor 
prose versions of the two favorites, ' Guy of Warwick ' 
and ' Eobert the Devil ' ; and the Elizabethan love 
stories are romances of adventure with pastoral 
decorations. 

The delicate poetry and analysis of courtly romance 
could hardly have been appreciated by the rude 
mediaeval barons and the common folk. They natu- 
rally had their own stories, in verse and prose, which 

1 English translation : ' The Lovers of Provence,' N.Y., 1890. 



FROM ARTHURIAN ROMANCE TO RICHARDSON 5 

were more in accord with their own lives, feelings, 
and ways of looking at things. These stories, of which 
the finished types are the French fabliau in octosyl- 
labic rhyming couplets and the Italian novella in prose, 
have for subject striking and humorous incidents of 
ordinary life. They are not, in content, all indigenous. 
Many of them are the common property of mankind, 
and have been traced in their germinal form to India. 
But what originally came from the East was almost 
invariably so modified and enriched that it seemed 
to spring from mediaeval soil. AVidely diffused were 
developments of ^sopian fable, such as the story of 
^Reynard the Fox,' in which animals are made to 
talk and reason, and comment in a gay satirical vein 
on human life and its affairs. The clergy catered 
to the popular taste for this kind of story, making, 
as Wyclif accused them, the basis of the sermon 
an Eastern tale, from which was drawn a new and 
fantastic moral. For the vulgar, the minstrels de- 
graded what had once been a noble art, singing their 
songs of humorous incident at street corners and at 
the wassails of the barons. They held up to cynical 
ridicule the intrigues and frailties of the clergy ; and 
gave a coarse realistic touch to Arthurian fable, tear- 
ing the mask from the courteous knights and the glit- 
tering ladies at Caerleon on Usk, and exposing amid 
peals of laughter from their hearers the cowardice 
and unfaithfulness beneath. In these popular songs 
and stories, frequently composed with an eye upon the 
characteristic weaknesses of human nature, are the 
beginnings of the realistic novel. 

During the reign of Richard the Second, John 
Gower collected and moralized, somewhat after the 



6 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

way of the clergy, many of the tales that had long 
been current. His great contemporary Chaucer — at 
will a romancer or a realist — clothed in artistic form 
the low intrigue, the fable, the adventure, and the 
romance of chivalry, prefacing them with a group of 
contemporary portraits. Delightful as are these tales 
of the Canterbury pilgrims, yet the poem in which 
Chaucer moved most directly toward the novel is 
'Troilus and Cressida.' Its heroine is the subtlest 
piece of psychological analysis in mediaeval fiction; 
and the shrewd and practical Pandarus is a character 
whose presence of itself brings the story down from 
the heights of romance to the plains of real life. 
Moreover, though written when the dramatic imagina- 
tion had hardly appeared elsewhere in romance, this 
tale of illicit passion possesses in a marked degree 
the structure of Elizabethan tragedy. Less than a 
century after the death of Chaucer, mediaeval and 
modern England met at the printing-press of William 
Caxton. 

2. The Spanish Influence 

The first half of the sixteenth century is a dreary 
waste in the history of English fiction. Its only oasis 
is Sir Thomas More's ' Utopia,' which, written and pub- 
lished in Latin, may be characterized as the ' Coming 
Eace ' or the ^ Looking Backward ' of our learned ances- 
tors. It is true that amid the fierce contest of Koman- 
ism and Protestantism for supremacy in English politics, 
men found time to read stories and romances, but 
they did not write them. They were content with 
those that Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson, and 



FROM ARTHURIAN ROMANCE TO RICHARDSON 7 

Copland edited and printed for them from English 
mediaeval manuscripts, or translated for them from 
French and German. The direct line in the develop- 
ment of English fiction, though not broken, is at this 
point worn to a slender thread, which we may neglect. 
When midway in the reign of Elizabeth creative work 
began anew, the main impetus came rather from south- 
ern Europe, especially from Spain. 

The romantic incidents early current in France 
and England were likewise well known in the Spanish 
peninsula, where they were moulded into fictions simi- 
lar to those we have described. From a Portuguese 
romance of adventure there grew up through the accre- 
tions of a long period the famous * Amadis de Gaula,' 
which has been preserved in a Spanish prose redac- 
tion made by Ordonez de Montalvo toward the end 
of the fifteenth century. It is the norm of the ro- 
mances of chivalry. For its machinery of wonders, 
hand-to-hand fights with giants, monsters, and devils, 
the romance dips into medisevalism. Its code of con- 
duct for the knight is likewise essentially the same as 
in the Arthurian cycle. When Amadis stands before 
Oriana, he is abashed and silent like Lancelot in the 
presence of Guenevere ; and for her he traverses Europe 
in search of adventure to prove his worth. But the 
reader of ^Amadis de Gaula' is at once aware that 
he is getting away from medisevalism. Its author 
had some artistic sense of what a novel should be. 
Its plot for a time has a degree of definiteness, for it 
drifts toward the marriage of Amadis and Oriana. 
Magic, which had hitherto been an adornment to 
please the superstitious, is made to bear an ethical 
import; and manners are invested with a new and 



8 DEVELOPMENT OE THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

striking dignity. There are appearing also new ideals 
of character, such as in the course of time Eichardson 
is to fix permanently in the novel : for example, Galaor 
is the first of the Lovelaces; and Amadis, a figure 
without taint or speck, is a remote ancestor of Sir 
Charles Grandison. And lastly, fiction is beginning 
to have a more serious motive ; it would defend the 
purity of the home, and it would proclaim that right 
will finally triumph over wrong. 

The Spanish romance of chivalry quickly degener- 
ated into grotesque adventure. The reaction against 
it first took the form of the pastoral. For a long time 
the poets of southern Europe had been writing series 
of pastoral poems connected by explanatory prose 
links; and just as Vergil had in a measure done in 
his ^Eclogues,' they were accustomed to disguise 
themselves and their friends under fictitious names. 
A good example of this kind of work is the ' Arcadia ' 
(1504), written by the Italian Jacopo Sannazaro. But 
substance was first given to the pastoral in the ' Diana ' 
(1558?) of George of Montemayor, a Portuguese by 
birth and a Spaniard by adoption, who localized his 
scene, and wrote mostly in prose. Men and women, 
who in the romances of chivalry were turned into 
knights and ladies, now assume the dress and life of 
shepherds and shepherdesses, wandering along gently 
flowing streams, sleeping beneath sycamores, and 
lamenting in madrigals over unrequited loves. To 
the ^ Diana' of Montemayor, which was translated 
into French and English, even attracting the attention 
of Shakespeare, is bound most closely all the succeed- 
ing pastoral romances of northern Europe. 

To Spain, too, the novel owes the development of 



FROM ARTHURIAN ROMANCE TO RICHARDSON 9 

another form of fiction. The incident in a popular 
mediaeval story was frequently a trick or a practical 
joke of a witty fellow. The romance of 'Eeynard 
the Fox ' is a collection of such tricks, which Master 
Reynard plays upon his brother animals. This kind 
of fiction was first turned to good account in prose in 
a little Spanish story entitled, ^ Lazarillo de Tormes ' 
(1554), which is the first of the picaresque novels, 
or the rogue stories. It differs from its mediaeval 
prototype in that the tricks are made secondary. A 
conspicuous aim of its unknown author was to put a 
young scamp behind the scenes of Spanish society, 
and let him report and comment upon what was 
taking place there. The story was translated into 
all the literary languages of Europe, and was fol- 
lowed by a host of imitations down to Fielding and 
Smollett. This rogue literature is one of the broadest 
avenues through which that license in speech which 
characterized the Eenaissance in its first stages 
entered the modern novel. 

Somewhat akin to the Spanish picaresque novel is 
<Don Quixote' (1605, 1616). In both, the point of 
view is unromantic. The picaresque novel is an 
indirect attack upon the romance of chivalry, a shell 
or two from the distance; ^Don Quixote' is a bom- 
bardment with the intent to demolish utterly 'the 
entire mischievous pile of romantic absurdity.' Cer- 
vantes accomplished his purpose by placing the 
world of romance in the real world, and letting the 
characters and sentiments of each mutually play 
upon one another. The knight is treated as a madman 
and his squire is tossed in a blanket. Along with this 
banter Cervantes carried such a careful reproduction 



10 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

of the language of the aristocracy and the rabble, and 
such impressive work in the delineation of character, 
that his romance becomes an epoch in the history of 
realism. It also marks the appearance in fiction of 
a new quality of humor. Europe, ancient and mediae- 
val, had its great humorists long before Cervantes: 
they are Aristophanes, Lucian, and Chaucer. But Cer- 
vantes' humor goes deeper than theirs. Like theirs, 
it is rippling and sparkling on the surface as a 
summer sea; as in Chaucer's, there is beneath a warm 
stream of kindly feeling; but still deeper there is 
a current of the intensest tragedy. Under the 
irresistible sway of this humor, approaching and 
receding from pathos, came Fielding, Goldsmith, 
Sterne, and Thackeray, and, in a less degree, Smollett, 
Scott, Dickens, and Bulwer; with the result that 
they created for the continual delight of their au- 
dience characters reminding one of Don Quixote. 
Among them are Parson Adams, Uncle Toby, 
Jonathan Oldbuck, and Colonel Newcome. 

3. The Elizabethans 

Elizabethan England inherited much that was best 
in English mediaeval fiction : the Arthurian romances, 
the moralized stories of Gower, and the highly fin- 
ished tales of Chaucer. From Italy came the pastoral 
romance in its most dreamy and attenuated form, the 
gorgeous poetic romances of Tasso and Ariosto, and 
many collections of novelle. Some of these novelle 
had as subject the interesting events of everyday life ; 
others were of fierce incident and color, and furnished 
Elizabethan tragedy with tremendous scenes. From 



FROM ARTHURIAN ROMANCE TO RICHARDSON 11 

Germany came jest-books and tales of necromancy; 
from France, the Greek story of adventure with its 
shipwrecks and pirates; from Spain came 'Amadis/ 
the ^ Diana ' of Montemayor, and the picaresque novel. 
And what the noble printers of the Renaissance gave 
her, England worked over into fictions of her own. 

The most characteristic of her adaptations, the one 
that most fully expressed her restless spirit of adven- 
ture and aesthetic restoration of the age of chivalry, 
was a romance midway between the knightly quest 
and the pastoral. Of this species, a conspicuous ex- 
ample is Sir Philip Sidney's ' Arcadia ' (1590). This 
romance has in places as background to its pretty 
wooing adventures the loveliness of the summer scenery 
about Wilton House, where it was planned, — violets 
and roses, meadows and wide-sweeping downs 'gar- 
nished with stately trees,' — and into it was in- 
fused the noble courtesy, the high sense of honor, 
and the delicate feeling of the first gentleman of the 
age. Though touching at points the real in its re- 
flection of English scenes and the princely virtues of 
Sidney and his friends, the ^Arcadia' is mainly an 
ideal creation. The country it describes is the land 
of dream and enchantment, of brave exploit, unblem- 
ished chastity, constant love, and undying friendship. 
Villany and profane passion darken these imaginary 
realms, but they, too, like the virtues, are all ideal. 
In structure the ' Arcadia ' is epic, having attached to 
the main narrative numerous episodes, one of which — 
the story of Argalus and Parthenia, faithful unto 
death — is among the most lovely situations romance 
has ever conceived and elaborated. 

In direct antithesis to its Arcadias, Elizabethan Eng- 



12 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

land made hasty studies of robbers and highwaymen ; 
out of which, under the artistic impulse of ' Lazarillo 
de Tormes' (translated into English in 1576), were 
developed several rogue stories of considerable pre- 
tension, such as ^Jack Wilton,' by Thomas JSTash, 
and ^ Piers Plain,' by Henry Chettle. To the same 
class of writings belong Greene's autobiographies, 
his ^ Eepentance,' and ' Groat's Worth of Wit,' in 
which the point of view is shifted from the comic 
to the tragic. Occasionally the Elizabethan romancers 
drew their subjects from the bourgeoisie. An amus- 
ing instance of this is ^Thomas of Eeading,' by 
Thomas Deloney, which contains from the picaresque 
point of view a graphic picture of the family life of 
the clothiers of the West, and of their mad pranks in 
London. Its scene is laid in the time of Henry the 
First, and it thus becomes historically interesting as 
one of the earliest attempts of the modern story-teller 
to invade the province of history. 

The most immediately popular Elizabethan fic- 
tion, whether romantic or realistic, was John Lyly's 
^Euphues' (1579-80). In this romance of high life 
there are no enchantments and exciting incidents such 
as had furnished the stock in trade of Montalvo and 
his followers. Lyly sought to interest by his style : 
alliteration, play upon words, antithesis, and a revival 
of the pseudo-natural history of mediaeval fable books. 
His characters are Elizabethan fops and fine ladies, 
who sit all night at Lady Elavia's supper-table, dis- 
cussing in pretty phrases such questions as, why 
women love men, whether constancy or secrecy is 
most commendable in a mistress, whether love in the 
first instance proceeds from the man or from the 



FROM ARTHURIAN ROMANCE TO RICHARDSON 13 

woman — a dainty warfare in which, are gained no 
victories. Lyly moralizes like a Gower on the pro- 
fane passion; he steps into the pulpit and preaches, 
telling mothers to suckle their children, and husbands 
to treat their wives mildly, for instruments sound 
sweetest when they be touched softest ; ' and for young 
men he constructs a moral code in minute detail, such as 
Shakespeare parodies in Polonius' advice to Laertes. 
Weak, puerile, and affected as he was, Lyly wrote with 
the best intentions ; he was a Puritan educated in the 
casuistry of Rome. 

Lyly was the founder of a school of romancers, who, 
from their following the affectations of ^ Euphues,* are 
known as Euphuists. With them all, language was 
first and matter secondary : ' A golden sentence is 
worth a world of treasure ' was one of their sayings. 
Of these Euphuists, Eobert Greene and Thomas Lodge 
excelled their master in the poetic qualities of their 
work; witness 'Menaphon' (1589) by the former, and 
^ Eosalind ' (1590) by the latter. In fact ' Rosalind,' a 
pastoral composed in the ornate language of * Euphues,' 
is the flower of Elizabethan romance. It satisfies 
some of the usual terms in the modern definition of 
the novel. For it is of reasonable length; it pos- 
sesses a kind of structure, and closes with an elaborate 
moral. 



4. Tlie Historical Allegory and the French Influence 

Erom Elizabeth to the Restoration, romancing and 
story-telling gradually became a lost art in England. 
An imitation of Sidney's ^Arcadia' now and then 
appeared, a sketch of a highwayman, and a few strag- 



14 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

gling imitations of contemporary French, romance. 
That was about all. There was for a time a steady- 
demand for Elizabethan favorites : ^ Euphues/ ^ Rosa- 
lind/ and especially the ' Groat's Worth of Wit/ and 
the ^ Arcadia.' With the excitement that sounded 
the note of the on-coming civil war — the trial of 
Hampden and the uprising of the Scots — the Eng- 
lish suddenly stopped reading fiction as well as writ- 
ing it. The one remarkable romance of the period 
that may be claimed for England is the ^ Argenis ' 
(1621), by John Barclay. Born in France of Scotch 
father and French mother, Barclay lived in France 
and in England, and finally migrated to Italy, where 
he wrote the ^ Argenis ' in Latin. He is thus a real ex- 
ample of the man without a country. His romance 
was at once diffused through Europe in five Latin edi- 
tions, and translations into English, French, Spanish, 
Italian, and Dutch. It is a medley. It resembles 
the ^ Arcadia ' in its shipwrecks, pirates, and dis- 
guises. In its weighty parts, which recommended 
it to the learned, it discusses the problems of state- 
craft, and is thus affiliated to the ' Utopia.' But what 
gives it a date in the development of fiction is that it 
is ^ a stately fable in manner of a history.' In it Bar- 
clay extends to prose romance the allegorical method 
of Spenser's ^ Faery Queen.' First, he reconstructs the 
political geography of Europe, moving France south 
to Sicily, Spain to Sardinia, and England to Maureta- 
nia. He then rechristens the chief personages of 
Europe of his own time : Henry the Third of France 
becomes Meleander; Catherine de Medici, Selenissa; 
Philip the Second of Spain, Radirobanes ; and Queen 
Elizabeth, Hyanisbe. Under these disguises, he pro- 



FROM ARTHURIAN ROMANCE TO RICHARDSON 15 

ceeds to relate the history of Europe during the last 
half of the sixteenth century ; describing particularly 
Henry's troubles with the Guises and the Huguenots, 
and Philip's attempted invasion of England and the 
defeat of the Armada. The characters are drawn in 
rough outline: Philip, proud and arrogant and in- 
triguing with the Guises ; Elizabeth, calm and digni- 
fied, and almost timid lest she offend her subjects. 
The romance closes with the marriage of Poliarchus 
(Henry of Navarre) to Argenis, a daughter of Henry 
the Third. No attempt is made at exact chronology 
or accuracy of historical detail. Catherine de Medici 
is a nurse to Argenis ; and Elizabeth is represented 
as having a husband who died just after she ascended 
the throne, and a sister Anne who was privately mar- 
ried to Henry the Third. As if to perplex further 
the imagination of the reader, not only are the scenes 
of the romance placed in classic countries, but to some 
extent the story is related in the terms of Koman life 
and custom. Poliarchus and Argenis are married in 
a temple dedicated to Juno and Lucina ; high priests 
perform the marriage ceremony, and the bridal party 
sing hymns to Hymen and pseans to Apollo. This is 
what the romanticists of later date were to call ' local 
color.' 

Barclay opened the way for a long line of French 
romances, which, beginning about 1625, extended 
through the following fifty years. The most popular 
of these romances were written by Gomberville, La 
Calprenede, Madeleine de Scuderi, and Madame de 
la Fayette. And the most famous in its time was 
Scuderi's ' Grand Cyrus,' which when completed ex- 
tended over 6679 pages in ten octavo volumes. 



16 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Translated into English in ponderous folios and 
incorporated into Restoration tragedy, these romances 
left their marks on English fiction down to the pub- 
lication of ^ Sir Charles Grandison.' Gomberville was 
wild and extravagant. His 'Polexandre' (1629-37) 
is a working over of the knightly prowess and the 
enchantments of ^ Amadis de Gaula/ with a slight 
historical background. La Calprenede emphasized 
history, which, however, he romanced excessively. 
His subjects were Cleopatra, Darius, Cyrus, and Phara- 
mond, the legendary founder of the French monarchy. 
Scuderi's subjects were Solyman the Magnificent, 
Cyrus, legendary Roman history, and the broils in 
Granada between the Zegris and the Abencerrages. 
In dealing with this material, Scuderi forced his- 
tory to do double duty. The career of Cyrus the 
Great she brought into harmony with the military 
exploits of the great Conde; and her heroines bear- 
ing Persian or Roman names were adjusted to por- 
traits of her friends. The purpose of Scuderi and 
her contemporaries was to decorate history with fic- 
tion for readers who found history in and of itself dry 
and uninteresting. However displeasing the means 
by which they did this may be, the fact remains 
that they are the founders of historical romance. 

Beneath the history is a formal psychology. To 
the French romancers descended, to be handed over 
to Richardson, that art of love which underlies me- 
diseval fiction. Again appeared those precepts whereby 
the lover renounced his individuality and became the 
slave of his mistress, no longer the lady of the castle 
but a shepherdess of dishevelled hair and ivory bow. 
Refinement followed refinement, until Scuderi out- 



FROM ARTHURIAN ROMANCE TO RICHARDSON 17 

did all her predecessors. For her ' Clelie ' she drew a 
curious allegorical map, known as the carte cle Tendre, 
on which is shown the water ways (sighs and tears) 
by which the traveller, setting out from the town of 
New Friendship, may reach — if he shun the dead 
lake of indifference and the wild and angry sea of 
enmity — one of the cities of Love. To turn the ex- 
travagances of Scuderi to finer issues, there were 
needed a sense for style and proportion and a knowl- 
edge of one's self. These essentials were possessed 
by Madame de la Fayette, who discovered, to translate 
a phrase from Sainte-Beuve, the border land of ro- 
mance and reality. With the covering of a brief his- 
tory, she concealed, without any effort at the hysterical 
climax, the story of her own heart, which had felt 
strongly but always sanely. ^ La Princesse de Cleves ' 
(1678), true and delicate in its psychology, is one of 
the classics of European fiction. 

Nothing could be easier than to ridicule the French 
romancers. The realists, as realism was understood 
in those days, saw their opportunity. Charles Sorel 
wrote a new ^Don Quixote,' entitled ^Le Berger Ex- 
travagant' (1628), in which he burlesqued the pasto- 
ral and the ideal treatment of love. What Moliere 
did with Scuderi's love-making in ^Les Precieuses 
E/idicules' is familiar to all. Boileau sounded the 
death knell of the old romances, when, in a Lucian 
dialogue, he marched, in long line, their heroes down 
to Hades, and consigned them to Pluto to be flogged 
and cast into Lethe ('Les Heros de Eoman,' 1664). 
But with ridicule there was usually combined, much as 
in the Spanish picaresque story, scandalous intrigues 
in low or bourgeois life. Of stories of this kind, the 
c 



18 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

most worthy of notice are ^Erancion' (1622), by- 
Charles Sorel, ^Le Eoman Comique' (1651-57), by- 
Paul Scarron, and 'Le Eoman Bourgeois' (1666), 
by Antoine Furetiere. These stories were all trans- 
lated, sometimes curiously mutilated, into English. 
Scarron's facetious manner of beginning and ending 
his chapters, Fielding has made us familiar with in 
^Joseph Andrews' and 'Tom Jones.' The 'Eoman 
Bourgeois' is the most graphic account of the ways 
and doings of the bourgeoisie that had appeared in 
fiction. There are scenes in it that might have been 
written by Zola. It seems to have given rise to 
those numberless sketches, written by Tom Brown 
and others, that were soon appearing in London, of 
adventures and scenes at Bartholomew Fair, on the 
streets, and in the playhouses. 

5. The Restoration 

After the battle of Worcester, the English began 
once more to read fiction. Lyly, Greene, and Sidney 
all survived the literary wreckage of the civil wars. 
From now on the French romances were translated as 
fast as they were published in France. And for reading 
them and discussing love, friendship, and statecraft, 
little coteries were formed, the members of which ad- 
dressed one another as 'the matchless Orinda,' 'the 
adored Valeria,' and ' the noble Antenor.' Best known 
in their own time were the groups of platonic lovers, 
professing an immaculate chastity, who hovered about 
Katherine Philips and Margaret Duchess of Newcastle. 
The literary efforts of these romantic ladies and gentle- 
men were directed to poetry and letter-writing rather 



FROM ARTHURIAN ROMANCE TO RICHARDSON 19 

than to fiction. There proceeded from them only one 
romance, ' Parthenissa ' (1664, 1665, 1677), by Eoger 
Boyle, an admirer of Katherine Philips. The most 
noticeable thing about this inexpressibly dull imita- 
tion of Scuderi, is its mixing up in much confusion 
several great Koman wars. For this, particularly 
for bringing on the scene together Hannibal and 
Spartacus, Boyle defended himself in his preface by 
an appeal to Vergil, who neglected two centuries in 
his story of ^Eneas and Dido. For making the same 
character stand now for one person and now for an- 
other in his historical allegory, he gracefully apolo- 
gized, but he might have cited Barclay as his precedent. 
Other similar romances were : ' Bentivolio and Urania ' 
(1660), by Nathaniel Ingelo ; ^Aretina ' (1661), by George 
Mackenzie; and ' Pandion and Amphigenia ' (1665), by 
John Crowne. The first is a religious fiction ; the 
second, made up of adventures, moral essays, and dis- 
quisitions on English and Scotch politics, was an at- 
tempt to revive the conceits of Lyly ; the third is an 
appropriation of Sidney's ^Arcadia.' Like Crowne, 
the Restoration romancers were generally satisfied to 
remodel and dress up old material. And what is true 
of them, is also true of the realists. An odd and 
wretchedly written production of this period is ' The 
English Kogue ' (1665-71), by Richard Head, and in 
part by Francis Kirkman. For tricks and intrigues 
they pillaged Spanish and French rogue stories^ 
Elizabethan sketches of vagabonds, and German 
and English jest-books ; and seasoned their medley 
with what probably then passed for humor. On the 
other hand, they wrote much from observation. In 
their graphic pictures of the haunts of apprentices, 



20 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

pickpockets, and highwaymen, they discovered the 
London slums. Pnrthermore, unlike their brother 
picaresque writers, they sent their hero on a voyage 
to the East, and thus began the transformation of the 
rogue story into the story of adventure as it was soon 
to appear in Defoe. 

More original work than this was done by Mrs. 
Aphra Behn, who wrote besides many comedies several 
short tales, the most noteworthy of which is ' Oroonoko ' 
(1696). In this story, which is a realistic account of a 
royal slave kidnapped in Africa and barbarously put 
to death at Surinam, she contrasts the state of nature 
with that of civilization, severely reprimanding the 
latter. ^Oroonoko' is the first humanitarian novel 
in English. Though its spirit cannot for a moment 
be compared, in moral earnestness, with ^ Uncle Tom's 
Cabin,' yet its purpose was to awaken Christendom 
to the horrors of slavery. The time being not yet ripe 
for it, the romance was for the public merely an 
interesting story to be dramatized. The novels of Mrs. 
Behn that bore fruit were her short tales of intrigue — 
versions in part of her own tender experiences. One 
of her successors was Mrs. Mary Manley, who wrote 
*The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zara- 
zians ' (1705), ' The New Atlantis ' (1709), and ' The 
Power of Love, in Seven Novels' (1720). Mrs. Man- 
ley was in turn followed by Mrs. Eliza Haywood, the 
author of ^Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to 
Utopia' (1725), and ^The Secret Intrigues of the Count 
of Caramania' (1727). These productions taken to- 
gether purport to relate the inside history of the court 
from the restoration of Charles the Second to the death 
of George the First. To their contemporaries, they 



FROM ARTHURIAN ROMANCE TO RICHARDSON 21 

were piquantly immoral ; to later times, they are not 
so amusing. Nevertheless, in the development of 
the novel, they have a place. They represent a con- 
scious effort to attain to the real, in reaction from 
French romance. They are specimens, too, of pre- 
cisely what was meant in England by the novel in dis- 
tinction from the romance, just before Eichardson : a 
short story of from one hundred to two hundred pages, 
assumed to be founded on fact, and published in a 
duodecimo volume. 

To John Bunyan the English novel owes a very 
great debt. What fiction needed, if it was ever to 
come near a portrayal of real life, was first of all to 
rid itself of the extravagances of the romancer and 
the cynicism of the picaresque story-teller. Though 
Bunyan was despised by his contemporary men of 
letters, it surely could be but a little time before 
the precision of his imagination and the force 
and charm of his simple and idiomatic English would 
be felt and then imitated. As no writer preceding 
him, Bunyan knew the artistic effect of minute de- 
tail in giving reasonableness to an impossible story. 
In the ^ Pilgrim's Progress ' (1678-84) he so mingled 
with those imaginative scenes of his own the familiar 
Scripture imagery and the still more familiar inci- 
dents of English village life, that the illusion of re- 
ality must have been to the readers for whom he 
wrote well-nigh perfect. The allegories of Barclay 
and Scuderi could not be understood without keys; 
Bunyan's ^ Palace Beautiful ' needed none. 



22 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

6. Literary Forms that contributed to the Novel 

Outside the sphere proper of fiction, there was 
slowly collecting in the seventeenth century material 
for the future novelist. It was quite the fashion for 
public and literary men — witness Pepys and Evelyn 
— to keep diaries and journals of family occurrences 
and of interesting social and political events. These 
diaries and journals suggested the novel of family 
life, and indicated a form of narrative that woul4 
lend to fiction the appearance of fact. In ^ Kobinson 
Crusoe ' and ' Pamela ' and hundreds of other novels 
down to the present, the journal has played a not 
inconsiderable part. At this time, too, men were 
becoming sufficiently interested in their friends and 
some of the great men of the past to write their biog- 
raphies. In 1640 Izaak Walton published the first 
of his charming ^ Lives.' A quick offshoot of the 
biography was the autobiography, which, as a man in 
giving a sympathetic account of himself is likely to 
run into poetry, came very close to being a novel. 
Margaret Duchess of Newcastle's ^Autobiography,' 
published in 1656 in a volume of tales, is a famous 
account of a family in which ^all the brothers were 
brave, and all the sisters virtuous.' Bunyan's ^ Grace 
Abounding ' is a story of the fierce struggles between 
the spirit and the flesh, and of the final triumph of 
the spirit. This autobiographic method of dealing 
with events, partly or wholly fictitious, has been a 
favorite with all our novelists, except with the very 
greatest; and it is employed more to-day than ever 
before. 

It also occurred to several writers after the Restora- 



FROM ARTHURIAN ROMANCE TO RICHARDSON 23 

tion that London life might be depicted by a series of 
imaginary letters to a friend. A most amusing bundle 
of two hundred and eleven such letters was published 
in 1664 by Margaret Duchess of Newcastle. Her 
object was to transfer to letters, scenes and incidents 
that had hitherto been the material of the comedy of 
humor. In 1678 a new direction to this letter-writing 
was given by a translation from the French of the 
'Portuguese Letters.' These letters of a Portuguese 
nun to a French cavalier revealed to our writers how 
a correspondence might be managed for unfolding a 
simple story, and for studying the heart of a betrayed 
and deserted woman. Edition after edition of the 
'Portuguese Letters' followed, and fictitious replies 
and counter-replies. In the wake of these continu- 
ations, were translated into English the letters of 
Eloisa and Abelard, containing a similar but more 
pathetic tale of man's selfishness and woman's devo- 
tion. They, too, went through many editions and were 
imitated, mutilated, and trivialized. As a result of 
this fashion for letter-writing, there existed early in 
the eighteenth century a considerable body of short 
stories in letter form. Hardly any of them are read- 
able ; but one of them is of considerable historical in- 
terest, ' The Letters of Lindamira, a Lady of Quality, 
written to her Friend in the Country ' (second edition, 
1713). The author, who may have been Tom Brown 
*of facetious memory,' states that, unlike his prede- 
cessors, his aim is ^to expose vice, disappoint vanity, 
to reward virtue, and crown constancy with success.' 
He accomplishes this ' by carrying Lindamira through 
a sea of misfortunes, and at last marrying her up to 
her wishes.' It was in this weak school of fiction, 



24 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

aiming at something it hardly knew what, that Rich- 
ardson must in some degree have learned how to man- 
age a correspondence. 

Moreover, the character-sketch, which was the most 
prolific literary form in England and France during the 
seventeenth century, has a direct bearing on the novel. 
As conceived by Ben Jonson and Thomas Overbury, 
who had before them a contemporary translation of 
Theophrastus, it was the sketch of some person, real 
or imaginary, who embodied a virtue or a vice, or some 
idiosyncrasy obnoxious to ridicule. One character 
was set over against another ; and the sentences 
descriptive of each were placed in the antithesis 
which the style of Lyly had made fashionable. Surely 
from this species of literature, the novelist took a les- 
son in the fine art of contrast. The type of sketch 
set by Jonson and Overbury was a good deal modified 
by the fifty and more character-writers who succeeded 
them. Not infrequently as a frame to the portrait was 
added a little piece of biography or adventure ; and 
there are a few examples of massing sketches in a 
loose fiction, as in the continuations of ^ The English 
Rogue,' and in the second part of the ^ Roman Bour- 
geois.' The treatment of the character-sketch by 
Steele and Addison in the ' Spectator ' (1711-12) 
was highly original. They drew portraits of repre- 
sentative Englishmen, and brought them together in 
conversation in a London club. They conducted Sir 
Roger de Coverley through Westminster Abbey, to the 
playhouse, to Vauxhall, into the country to Coverley 
church and the assizes ; they incidentally took a retro- 
spective view of his life, and finally told the story of 
his death. When they had done this, they had not 



FROM ARTHURIAN ROMANCE TO RICHARDSON 25 

only created one of the best defined characters in our 
prose literature, but they had almost transformed the 
character-sketch into a novel of London and provin- 
cial life. From the ' Spectator ' the character-sketch, 
with its types and minute observation and urbane ridi- 
cule, passed into the novel, and became a part of it. 

7. Tlie Passing of the Old Romance 

At the dawn of the Renaissance, verse was usually 
an embellishment of fiction, and the perfect workman 
was Chaucer, whose 'Troilus and Cressida' and ^Can- 
terbury Tales ' are differentiated from the modern 
novel mainly by the accident of rhyme. Of the later 
romances in prose, the two that have gained among all 
classes a world-wide fame are ' Don Quixote ' and the 
' Pilgrim's Progress ' ; and second to them is the 
^ Princess of Cleves.' Nearly everything else that has 
been mentioned is to the modern as if it had never 
been written. That such a fate should have overcome 
the old romances must be lamented by every one ac- 
quainted with their lovely imagery and inspiring 
ideals of conduct. But it was inevitable, for they al- 
most invariably failed in their art. The great novel- 
ists since Fielding have taught the public that a novel 
must have a beginning and an end. A reader of con- 
temporary fiction, after turning a few pages of Sidney's 
'Arcadia,' becomes aware that he is not at the be- 
ginning of the story at all, but is having described to 
him an event midway in the plot. From this point 
on, the narrative, instead of moving forward untram- 
melled, except for the pause of an easy retrospect, 
becomes more and more perplexed by episodes, which 



26 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

are introduced, suspended, resumed, and twisted within 
one another, according to a plan not easily understood 
The picaresque writers, the hrst of them, adopted the 
straightforward manner of autobiography; but under 
the influence of romance, they, too, soon began to indulge 
in episodes. If at their best the picaresque stories had 
a beginning, they had no end. They were published 
in parts'; each part was brought to a close with the 
recurring paragraph that a continuation will be writ- 
ten if the reader desires ; and so adventure follows 
adventure, to be terminated only by the death of the 
author. It is thus obvious that the romancers and 
story-tellers had no clearly defined conception of what 
a novel should be as an independent literary species. 
They took as their model the epic, not the well- 
ordered epic of Homer or Vergil, but the prose epic 
as perverted by the rhetoricians in the decadent period 
of Greek art.^ 

Moreover, it has come to be demanded not only that 
a novel must possess an orderly structure, but that it 
shall be a careful study of some phase of real life, or 
of conduct in a situation which, however impossible 
in. itself, the imagination is willing to accept for the 
time being as possible. Accordingly, those who wish 
to shun the word ^ romance ' are accustomed to speak of 
the novel of character and the novel of incident. In 
the novel of character the interest is directed to the 
portrayal of men and women, and the fable is a sub- 
ordinate consideration; in the novel of incident the 
interest is directed to what happens, and the characters 
come more by the way. To the former class no one 

1 See the Greek romance, * Theagenes and Chariclea,' translated, 
T. Underdown. 1577. 



FROM ARTHURIAN ROMANCE TO RICHARDSON 27 

would hesitate to assign ' The Mill on the Floss/ To 
the same class might very properly be assigned ' The 
House of the Seven Gables,' which, though Hawthorne 
called it a romance, is, as he intended it, * true to the 
human heart/ To the latter class belong the Waverley 
novels, and to mention an extreme example, * The 
Prisoner of Zenda/ Before Defoe, writers of fiction 
did in some degree fulfil the conditions necessary to 
a novel in the modern view ; but to concoct fantastic 
adventures in high or low life, in accord neither with 
the truth of fact, nor with the laws of a sane imagina- 
tion, nor with the permanent motives that sway our 
acts — that was the main business of the romancer 
and the story-teller. From them to Defoe and Rich- 
ardson the transition is analogous to that from the 
first Elizabethan plays to Shakespeare and his con- 
temporaries; it is the passing from a struggling and 
misdirected literary form to a well-defined species. 
Nevertheless, a study of European fiction before 
Defoe has intellectual, if not aesthetic, compensa- 
tions, and to the student it is imperative. It gives 
one a large historical perspective. From Arthurian 
roma,nce and the fabliau downward, in the eternal 
swing between idealism and realism, there is a con- 
tinuous growth — an accumulation of incidents, situa- 
tions, characters, and experiments in structure, much 
of which was a legacy to the eighteenth century. 

8. Daniel Defoe 

^Robinson Crusoe' (1719) is the earliest English 
novel of incident. It was at once recognized in 
England and throughout literary Europe as some- 



28 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

thing different from the picaresque story to which it 
is akin. In what does this difference consist ? The 
situations and jests of Head and Chettle were in some 
cases as old as Latin comedy; 'Robinson Crusoe' 
was an elaboration of a contemporary incident^ that 
made a fascinating appeal to the imagination. The 
writer of the rogue story did not expect to be 
believed. The aim of Defoe was to invest his 
narrative with a sense of reality ; to this end he 
made use of every device at his command to deceive 
the reader. He took as a model for his narra- 
tive the form that best produces the illusion of 
truth — that of current memoirs with the accompani- 
ment of a diary. He adroitly remarks in his preface 
that he is only the editor of a private man's adventures, 
and adds confidentially that he believes ' the thing to 
be a just history of fact/ at least, that ' there is no 
appearance of fiction in it.' He begins his story very 
modestly by briefly sketching the boyhood of a rogue 
who runs away to sea — one of thousands — and thus 
gradually prepares the reader for those experiences 
which are to culminate in the shipwreck on the 
Island of Despair. When he gets his Crusoe there, 
he does not send him on a quest for exciting adven- 
tures, but surprises us by a matter-of-fact account of 
Crusoe's expedients for feeding and clothing himself 
and making himself comfortable. He brings the 
story home to the Englishmen of the middle-class, 
for whom he principally writes, by telling them that 
their condition in life is most conducive to happiness, 

1 See Steele's account of Alexander Selkirk in the * English- 
man,' No. 26. 



FROM ARTHURIAN ROMANCE TO RICHARDSON 29 

and by giving expression to their peculiar tenets : 
their trust in dreams, their recognition of Providence in 
the fortuitous concurrence of events, and their dogmas 
of conviction of sin, of repentance, and of conversion. 
And finally, ' Robinson Crusoe ' has its message. 
Undoubtedly its message is too apparent for the 
highest art, but it is a worthy one: Be patient, be 
industrious, be honest, and you will at last be re- 
warded for your labor. ^ Robinson Crusoe ' must 
have seemed to the thousands of hard-laboring Eng- 
lishmeu a symbol of their own lives, their struggles, 
their failures, and their final rest in a faith that there 
will sometime be a settling of things justly in the 
presence of Him ' who will allow no shuffling.' To 
put it briefly, Defoe humanized adventure. 

^ Robinson Crusoe ' was the most immediately 
popular fiction that had yet been written. At once 
it became a part of the world's literature, and it 
remains such to this day. Defoe took advantage of 
its vogue to write many other adventures on land 
and sea. Captain SinG:leton's tour across Africa is as 
good reading as Stanley; and to the uninitiated, it 
seems quite as true to fact. In ^Moll Flanders' is 
gathered together a mass of material concerning the 
dregs of London — thieves and courtesans — that 
remains unequalled even among the modern natural- 
ists. The ' Memoirs of a Cavalier,' once regarded as 
an actual autobiography, so realistic is the treatment, 
is the relation of the adventures of a cavalier in the 
army of Gustavus Adolphus, and later at Marston 
Moor and Naseby. It is a masterly piece of historical 
semblance, and it is thus significant. The ^Journal 
of the Plague Year ' is so documentary in appearance 



30 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

that public libraries still class it as a history, though 
it is fictitious throughout. This verisimilitude which 
was attained through detail and the unadorned lan- 
guage of everyday life is Defoe's great distinction. 
Bunyan was in a measure his forerunner, and his 
immediate successor was Swift, who, under the 
guise of his delightful voyages among the Lillipu- 
tians and Brobdingnagians (1726), ridiculed in sav- 
age irony his king, ' his own dear country,' and ' the 
animal called man.' These three writers who usher 
in a new era for the novel are the source to which 
romance has returned again and again for instruction, 
from Scott to Stevenson. 



CHAPTER II 

The Eighteenth-century Realists 

1. Samuel Riclmrdson 

In 1740 Samuel Richardson, then a well-to-do Lon- 
don printer, fifty years old, published anonymously the 
first part of 'Pamela; or. Virtue Rewarded.' It is a 
story of a waiting-maid, who, by her prudent conduct, 
gains a wild young gentleman for a husband, and re- 
forms him. Richardson was hardly satisfied with his 
hurriedly written ' Pamela.' It was structurally weak ; 
and its morality was questionable. He now read Addi- 
son, and thus indirectly Aristotle, on the principles of 
dramatic art, and produced the 'History of Clarissa 
Harlowe' (1747-48). Clarissa, when in imminent 
danger of being forced by her father and brother to 
marry a man whom she hates, places herself under the 
protection of Mr. Robert Lovelace, by whom she is 
hurried away from Harlowe Place, taken to London, 
and lodged in the house of a Mrs. Sinclair. She flees 
from her seducer, is found, brought back, and drugged. 
Again fleeing, she is maliciously arrested for debt, and 
imprisoned. At length she dies broken-hearted in a re- 
spectable London lodging. Lovelace expiates his crime 
on the field of honor. This second novel of Richard- 
son's, which is one of the masterpieces of English 
fiction, was not wholly satisfactory to his friends. 
Lovelace had been made too attractive, and women 

31 



32 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

fell in love with him. It was not quite clear why he 
should not have been reclaimed, as was the libertine 

Mr. B in ^ Pamela.' Eicliardson saw no way out of 

these criticisms, although he believed them to be un- 
just, except by writing another novel in which he should 
embody his ideal of a perfect gentleman. In special 
preparation for this undertaking, he probably read the 
' Cyropaedia ' of Xenophon. ^ Sir Charles Grandison * 
was published in 1753. Harriet Byron — an orphan 
of rank, very tender and sensitive — is living with her 
uncle and aunt in Northamptonshire. Her provincial 
lovers are of course numerous; and of course she 
politely but firmly rejects them all. She is taken to 
London by her cousins, Mr. and Mrs. Reeves, on a two 
months' visit. Erom a masquerade in the Haymarket, 
she is carried off by Sir Hargrave Pollexfen. On 
Hounslow heath, Sir Hargrave's chariot and six runs 
counter to the chariot and six of Sir Charles Grandi- 
son ; and Miss Byron throws herself into the arms of 
her deliverer. There are obstacles in the way to the 
immediate union of Sir Charles and Miss Byron. For 
should the marriage take place at once, it is certain 
half a score of women would break their hearts ; and 
a very perplexing problem is, what shall be done with 
Clementina, a beautiful and passionate Italian to 
whom Sir Charles is provisionally engaged. But the 
gentle 'condescending reasonings' of the perfect hero 
persuade Clementina to marry some one else and not 
ruin the happiness of Miss Byron. 

These three novels are mostly in letter form and 
of ample extent. As originally published, 'Pamela' 
filled four duodecimo volumes ; ' Clarissa,' seven ; and 
' Grandison,' seven. In the first of them — which a 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 33 

contemporary French translator spoke of as a petit 
ouvrage^ — there are, according to the author's own 
lists, forty-two characters ; in the second, thirty-eight ; 
and in the third, counting the Italians,^ whom Rich- 
ardson by an exquisite blunder placed outside the 
human pale, there are fifty. Richardson felt, as others^ 
have since his time, that his novels were too long, 
and he often apologized to his audience, telling them 
how much he had pruned away, and reminding them 
that the charm of the letter consists in the full utter- 
ance of the heart while it is ' agitated by hopes and 
fears/ By thus letting his characters speak without 
restraint, he brought the reader into their immediate 
presence as friend and associate in their daily life. 
His contemporaries talked and wrote about Pamela, 
Clarissa, and Lovelace, as if they existed in flesh and 
blood as really as Samuel Richardson himself. Lit- 
erary pilgrims crossed the Channel, not only to pay 
their respects to the humble printer at North End and 
Parson's Green, but also to search out Harlowe Place 
and the Grandison mansion. The first great imagi- 
native success of the novelist was Defoe's, who made 
fictitious adventure seem real; the second was Rich- 
ardson's, who made equally real his men and women, 
and the scenes in which he placed them. The one 
thereby discovered the art of the novel of incident; 
the other, the art of the novel of character. 

1 Preface to French translation of * Pamela,' by Prevost, 1741. 

2 Richardson divided his characters into three classes : men, 
women, and Italians. 

3 On the other hand, Tennyson is reported to have said of 
'Clarissa Harlowe ': ' I like those great still hooks,' and *I wish 
there were a great novel in hundreds of volumes that I might go 
on and on.' — Alfred Lord Tennyson, by his son, vol. ii. 372. 

D 



34 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

The content of Richardson's novels is quite differ- 
ent from that of high romance. They contain no gor- 
geous descriptions of palaces, no adventures on sea or 
land, no swimming of broad and angry streams, no 
earthquakes, no enchanted castles. Their most sensa- 
tional incident is an abduction. Richardson thus 
brushed aside the paraphernalia of romance. His plot 
is always slight, serving merely as a framework for a 
minute study of the heart. For this work he had forty 
years of preparation. When a boy he wrote love letters 
for the country girls in an obscure village somewhere 
in Derbyshire. When as a successful man of business 
he took up his residence at North End, Hammer- 
smith, he received into his house for protracted visits 
of weeks and months, highly moral but rather senti- 
mental young women, whom he called his ^adopted 
children,' and who in turn addressed him as ' dear 
papa.' When they go home or are visiting their 
friends, he sends long letters to them, and they re- 
spond in equally wire-drawn replies, scolding him and 
threatening him with pretty curses because he will 
not save Lovelace or marry Sir Charles Grandison 
to Clementina. These self-conscious young women, to 
whom he acts as a kind of father confessor, he sub- 
jects to close scrutiny. He watches their every act 
and guesses at its motive. Every movement of theirs, 
every attitude, every trembling of the hand or scrap- 
ing of the foot, every accent of a word spoken in lan- 
guor or in fretfulness, every flush of the cheek, every 
rising tear, every faint gurgling in the throat, has a 
meaning to him ; and in heightened form he registers 
and interprets what he observes, in imaginary letters. 
In fiction, movements in thought and feeling — mere 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 35 

flutterings of the heart — have taken the place of 
adventure. A contemporary poetaster compressed the 
obvious incidents of ' Grandison ' into a poem of a 
hundred lines. Thus, as is at once evident, the novel 
of character which Kichardson wrote is psychological ; 
it is a revealing of states of feeling in acts. 

As a psychologist, Richardson is loosely bound by 
several threads with romance. Scuderi had her formal 
analysis of passion, which she received from mediae- 
val metaphysic through the romances of chivalry, and 
which she in turn handed over to her successors. 
What Kichardson did was to give this old love casu- 
istry a real basis in real life. In this he was in part 
anticipated by the French novelist and dramatist, 
Pierre Carlet de Marivaux, whose ^ Marianne ' (1731- 
41) is in plot and purpose much like 'Pamela.' For 
both have a virtuous young woman in distress as the 
central character, and both are an evolution of the 
belle dme, an unfolding and triumph of the stainless 
spirit. There are of course many points of difference 
between the two novels. Marivaux makes a much 
larger use than Richardson of the current incidents 
of contemporary comedy; and love, as he conceived 
it, is more like the gallantry of the earlier romancers. 
Though there is very little evidence for the common 
assertion that Richardson modelled his first novel on 
' Marianne,' Marivaux is nevertheless logically the link 
between him and Scuderi. 

There is also in Richardson a lingering on of one 
form of allegory — the concrete representation of the 
virtues and the vices. Pamela in the first part of the 
story is Chastity, and afterward she degenerates into 
Prudence. Her struggles against the assaults of a 



36 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

debauchee are a survival of purity in the meshes of 
lust; such, for example, as the disagreeable episode 
of Una and Sansloy, in ^The Faery Queen.' Sir 
Charles Grandison is an embodiment of what Spenser 
meant by Magnificence — a virtue which is the per- 
fection of all the rest and contains them all. He is 
compassionate, humane, benevolent, kind to his fam- 
ily and friends, truth-loving, steady in his principles, 
modest, courageous, unreserved, prudent, expeditious 
in business, manly, nobly sincere, amiable, artless, 
and handsome. Of him. Miss Byron writes to Lady 

G : ' Do you think, my dear, that had he been the 

first man, he would have been so complaisant to his 
Eve as Milton makes Adam f . . . No ; it is my opin- 
ion that your brother would have had gallantry enough 
to his fallen spouse to have made him extremely re- 
gret her lapse ; but that he would have done his oivn 
duty were it but for the sake of posterity, and left 
it to the Almighty, if such had been his pleasure, to 
have annihilated his first Eve, and given him a second.' 
To the drama, the indebtedness of Eichardson is also 
considerable ; somewhat in the way of character, much 
more in the way of plot and structure. After the 
famous attack of Jeremy Collier on the immorality of 
the English stage (1698), playwrights very generally 
gave a new turn to comedy. The libertine, who in 
Eestoration comedy had quitted the stage in a blaze of 
glory, was now reclaimed in the fifth act, and his 
penitence was rewarded by the possession of the fair 
Victoria. This is the denouement of ^Pamela.' Com- 
edy underwent further modifications, until it was turned 
into melodrama ; the repentance of the villain in the 
fifth act was no longer accepted — he was hanged. This ' 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 37 

is the denouement — only less violent — of * Clarissa 
Harlowe.' In other words, ' Pamela ' is bourgeois 
comedy ; ^ Clarissa Harlowe ' is bourgeois tragedy. 
Bevil, of Steele's ' Conscious Lovers/ in his Christian 
feeling against duels and his success in disarming his 
adversary by his magnanimous conduct, is a rudimen- 
tary Sir Charles Grandison. Indiana, in the same 
comedy, is a slight sketch of a Clementina. Richard- 
son seems also to have derived from the drama a time 
limit. His ideal is that the occurrences of any one 
day shall be related on that day. Moreover, although 
^Clarissa Harlowe' consists of seven volumes, he is 
careful to compress the narrative of all the events 
within the term of one year. This is without doubt 
a conscious extension of the dramatist's one day to 
a fixed period more suitable to the novel. Richardson 
often arranges and conducts his dialogue precisely as 
if he were writing a play for the closet. 'Clarissa 
Harlowe' is largely made up of dramatic dialogue 
within the letters. Indeed, when speaking critically 
of this novel, Richardson calls it a Dramatic Narra- 
tive. One should, however, be on his guard against 
overestimating this indebtedness. Richardson wrote 
with little plan ; letter grew out of letter naturally ; 
the drama in many ways gave mere direction to his 
narrative. To his genius alone he owed it that out of 
the wrecks of a decaying literary form he could con- 
struct a * Clarissa Harlowe,' in which event after event 
moves forward to the catastrophe with the inevita- 
bleness of an ' OEdipus ' or of a ' Hamlet.' 

Richardson declared over and over again, in his 
novels, his prefaces, and his postscripts, that the 
underlying motive of all his work was moral and re- 



38 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

ligious instruction. In an age (to paraphrase Richard- 
son's own words) when scepticism and infidelity were 
openly avowed and propagated from the press, when 
public and domestic morality was blotted from the 
catalogue of Christian virtues, and even the clergy 
had become a body of interested men, he thought it 
his duty to teach the Christian tenets as he under- 
stood them. His sinners who put off repentance to 
the last moment, die *in dreadful agonies.' Pamela 
is protected and rewarded by that Providence which 
guards innocence. The rake who becomes her husband 
is reformed by the daily sight of the Christian virtues. 
Clarissa escaping the pollution of her earthly environ- 
ment becomes as one ' ensky'd and sainted ' ; and the 
novel of which she is the heroine is intended as a 
drama of spiritual triumph, to be contrasted with the 
fatalism of heathendom. 

It was customary in Eichardson's time to read his 
novels aloud in the family circle. When some pa- 
thetic passage was reached, the members of the family 
would retire to separate apartments to weep ; and after 
composing themselves, they would return to the fire- 
side to hear the reading proceed. It was reported to 
E-ichardson that, on one of these occasions, ^an ami- 
able little boy' sobbed as if his little sides would 
burst, and resolved to mind his books that he might 
be able to read 'Pamela' through without stopping. 
That there might be something in the family novel 
expressly for the children, Eichardson sometimes 
stepped aside from his main narrative to tell them a 
moral tale. Here are two companion pieces, clipped 
of their decorations. There were once two little boys 
and two little girls, who never told fibs, who were 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 39 

never rude, noisy, miscliievous, nor quarrelsome ; who 
always said their prayers before going to bed and as 
soon as they arose. They grew up. The masters be- 
came fine gentlemen ; and the misses became fine ladies 
and housewives. There were once three naughty boys 
who had a naughty sister. They were always quarrel- 
ling and scratching, and would not say their prayers. 
They, too, grew up. One of the boys was drowned 
at sea, the second turned thief, and the third was 
forced to beg his bread in a far country. And the 
naughty girl fell from a tree and broke her arm, and 
died of fever. 

Not only did Richardson aim to teach men and 
women, boys and girls, that righteousness will be 
rewarded and sin punished either here or hereafter 
(with an emphasis everj^where except in the character 
of Clarissa Harlowe on the here rather than on the 
hereafter), but he sought to arouse discussion on 
special cases of conduct. In this he was making a 
new and skilful use of the disquisitions of the moral 
romancers, of which Lyly was the Elizabethan type. 
The questions his characters are made to propose to 
themselves and answer are such as these : Is first 
love first folly ? What is the distinction between 
love and liking? Can a man be in love with two 
women at the same time ? At what age ought one to 
marry ? How should a young woman conduct herself 
when asked in marriage ? How should a perfect gen- 
tleman behave when she has accepted him ? Should 
he kiss her hand once or twice ? Is fear on the part 
of a woman necessary to true love ? Should mothers 
suckle their children ? How far should a wife's wor- 
ship of her husband interfere with the worship of 



40 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

God ? How often, to be in good form, should we 
attend church ? Should we go to masquerades ? How 
early in life ought we to make our wills ? When is a 
duel justifiable? Should we dock the tails of our 
horses ? etc. Questions of this kind in the form of 
^ beautiful and edifying ' maxims, collected from his 
novels and alphabetically arranged, Richardson pub- 
lished in a duodecimo volume of four hundred pages — 
^the pith and marrow' of his teaching. Trivial and 
overformal and undignified as the moral code of Rich- 
ardson may now appear, it excited popular interest 
throughout Europe; and that its influence was in 
general for good, we have the authority of many, 
among whom are Dr. Johnson and Goethe. His friends 
and admirers poured letters in upon him, concurring 
and disagreeing with him. They called him a ^ divine 
man,' and felt that he was teaching his generation 
^ how to live and how to die ' more effectively and 
more eloquently than Wesley and Whitefield. 

Among English writers, only Dickens has received 
from his contemporaries the praise Richardson re- 
ceived from his. In his grotto at North End, friends 
came to hear him read from his novels as they were 
making, or to kiss his inkhorn. A Mr. Edwards, 
author of ' Canons of Criticism,' wrote to Richardson, 
^ I have read, and as long as I have eyes will read, all 
your three most excellent pieces at least once a year.' 
Two years later the critic died. Young, author of 
'Night Thoughts,' wrote, ^As I look upon you as 
an instrument of Providence, I likewise look upon 
you as a sure heir of a double immortality ; when our 
language fails, one, indeed, may cease ; but the failure 
of the Heavens and the Earth will put no period to the 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 41 

other.' This popularity was not confined to England. 
Diderot may be regarded as handing down the decision 
of Prevost, d'Alembert, Rousseau, and literary France, 
when he placed Richardson's novels on the shelf with 
Moses, Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles. From Ger- 
many, Mrs. Klopstock, wife of the author of the 
* Messiah,' sent a letter in this strain after the 
publication of ' Grandison ' : ^ Having finished your 
^' Clarissa " (oh ! the heavenly book !), I would have 
pray'd you to write the history of a manly Clarissa, 
but I had not courage enough at that time. . . . You 
have since written the manly Clarissa without my 
prayer; oh, you have done it, to the great joy and 
thanks of all your happy readers ! Now you can 
write no more, you must write the history of an 
Angel.' When his friends ventured to criticise him, 
this sentence from the Dutch translator of ^ Clarissa ' 
indicates the tone : * I read [your works] with a search- 
ing eye, yet not finding any blemishes, but meeting 
one or two little bright clouds, which, more accurately 
viewed perhaps, are a collection of shining stars.' 
This extravagant praise was not insincere, nor was 
it misplaced. Only the intellect had been addressed, 
by Dryden, Pope, and Swift. Richardson discovered 
anew the heart. The rise of the humble printer had 
been sudden and unexpected. Unlearned, he dis- 
covered what for a quarter of a century Europe had 
been looking for, not knowing precisely what it 
wanted, a form of literature that should adequately 
present its life as it was, united with an ideal of life 
as it ought to be. 

Richardson added to fiction four full-length por- 
traits: the libertine of hard intellectual polish, the 



42 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

immaculate gentleman, the chaste woman, and the 
Protestant martyr. To him, above all others, the world 
is indebted for the novel of letters. He founded a 
school which did not become extinct in England till 
the publication of ^ Jane Eyre.' His influence was at 
once felt on the literature of the Continent ; his novels 
as a whole or in part were translated into French, 
Italian, German, and Dutch ; and ^ Pamela ' was drama- 
tized by Voltaire and by Goldoni. His imitators in 
Erance and Germany may be counted by scores, and the 
tremendous latent force which lay hidden in his emo- 
tionalism, when cut loose from moral and religious 
restraint, was made manifest in Eousseau. 

2. Henry Fielding 

We are not likely to overestimate the historical 
position of Eichardson ; we are more likely to under- 
estimate it. Moreover, in the logical sequence of 
minor incident, ^ Clarissa Harlowe ' has been excelled 
only by the maturest work of George Eliot. And yet 
the weaknesses and shortcomings of Eichardson are 
apparent, and were apparent in his own time. His 
ethical system was based upon no wide observation or 
sound philosophy; it was the code of a Protestant 
casuist. He was a sentimentalist, creating pathetic 
scenes for their own sake and degrading tears and 
hysterics into a manner. His language was not free 
from the affectations of the romancers ; even his 
friends dared tell him with caution and circumlocu- 
tion that he was fond of the nursery phrase. He was 
unacquainted, as he said himself, with the high life 
he pretended to describe. Never was there a better 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 43 

opportunity for the ridicule of a Cervantes. And 
England had a Cervantes fully equipped. Though he 
could not hope to carry with him the great body of 
Puritan England, he was sure of finding readers and 
applauders among the educated and among those in 
whom lived on the spirit of the Cavaliers. When 
Richardson published * Pamela/ Henry Fielding was 
in the strong prime of manhood. He had been edu- 
cated at Eton and had studied law at Leyden. He 
was gaining a familiarity with the Greek and Latin 
poets, historians, and critics that is very disheartening 
to the modern student. He had absorbed the spirit of 
the great European humorists 'who laughed satire 
into the world,' — Aristophanes, Lucian, Cervantes, 
Rabelais, Shakespeare, Moliere, Swift, and Lesage. 
In the long line, only Chaucer is missing. His comedies 
are evidence that he had observed life closely, in 
Somersetshire and more especially in the town, in the 
region of the Haymarket and Covent Garden. His 
experience, probably owing to his own improvidence, 
had been hard ; and to him the talk about the reward 
of the innocent in this life must have appeared amus- 
ing. As a playwright he had attacked the rant and 
the sentimentalism of the contemporary drama, and 
had extended his satire, with the direct thrust of 
an Aristophanes, against the political methods and 
wholesale bribery of Walpole and his agents. To 
ridicule Richardson was simply to turn in another 
direction shafts that he had already learned to handle. 
'Joseph Andrews' was published in 1742. Field- 
ing began the novel with the intention of writing a 
parody on 'Pamela.' The ridicule, boisterous and 
recklessly outspoken, made Richardson wince. His 



44 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

turning Richardson's Lord B into Lord Booby, and 

his putting into the mouth of Parson Adams a public 
rebuke of Pamela and her husband for laughing in 
church, were happy strokes. As Pielding went on 
with his writing, the occasion of his story slipped 
from his memory, and he revealed his inner self, his 
high breeding, his fidelity, and his kindness of heart. 
He no sooner created Parson Adams than he fell in 
love with him, as all the world has done since. 

In form ^ Joseph Andrews ' is a series of adventures 
in high and low life, divided into books having mock- 
heroic introductions, and diversified by episodes. It 
has its prototype in the burlesque adventures by Cer- 
vantes and Scarron and in the picaresque novel as re- 
fined by Lesage in ' Gil Bias ' (1715-35). In bring- 
ing his adventures to a close. Fielding burlesqued a 
favorite type of the ancient drama — that of recogni- 
tion and revolution. He marshals his leading char- 
acters at Booby Hall, where in the presence of the 
Booby s Joseph unbuttons his coat and displays on 
his left breast ^ as fine a strawberry as ever grew in a 
garden.' The mystery of his hero's parentage, which 
Pielding has long been juggling with, as if he were 
writing another ^ (Edipus the King,' is out ; and there 
is no longer an impediment to the marriage of Joseph 
and Fanny. As the final title for his production 
Fielding hit upon the term ^ comic epic' He had in 
mind the lost ' Margites ' of Homer, which bore, Aris- 
totle says, the same relation to Attic comedy as the 
' Iliad ' bore to Attic tragedy.^ The ^ Margites ' was a 
dramatic epic, from which, according to Aristotle, 

1 Aristotle's 'Poetics,' iv. 9. 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 45 

comedy was to detach, itself. Fielding reversed the 
process, investing comedy with epic proportions, and 
as more suitable to modern society, writing in prose 
instead of verse. 

^Joseph Andrews ' was followed by ^ Jonathan Wild * 
(1743), in which Fielding maintains the thesis that 
force, fraud, and heartlessness — qualities which are 
commonly regarded as the peculiar endowments of the 
successful housebreaker and highwayman — are like- 
wise characteristics of Alexander and Caesar and of 
great men in all ages, and particularly of eighteenth- 
century England. It is more ideal in its motive than 
was usual with Fielding. Its logical consequence was 
Smollett's ' Count Fathom.' 

^ Tom Jones ' was published in 1749. It stands for 
the fulness of Fielding's art and manhood. Into it 
Fielding compressed his richest observations on life 
and his ripest thought; and expended in its compo- 
sition ' some thousands of hours.' ^ Tom Jones ' is the 
consummation of his earlier plan of transforming 
comedy into the comic epic. Fielding still writes with 
his eye upon Aristotle and the Greek drama. He 
keeps from the reader the secret of Jones's parentage, 
which he manages with greater artistic effect than 
the similar secretin 'Joseph Andrews.' It becomes a 
directing force on the course of events, and an element 
of interest to the reader. The discovery, when it 
comes, is not a fantastic surprise operated by the 
machinery of gypsies and the exchange of children in 
the cradle ; the reader has been looking forward to it, 
for he has been prepared for it. The scenes are still 
constructed as in comedy. As we read on, it is as if 
we were assisting at the representation of a score of 



46 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

comedies, parallel and successive ; some pathetic, some 
burlesque, others possessing the gay wit of Vanbrugh 
and Congreve — all of which, after a skilfully manipu- 
lated revolution of circumstances, are united in a 
brilliant conclusion. Instead of being burdened, as 
were the earlier epic romancers, with a number of 
narratives to be gathered up in the last chapters, 
Fielding in the main becomes his own story-teller 
throughout. Character is unfolded, and momentum is 
given to his plot by direct, not reported, conversations. 
All devices to account for his subject-matter, such as 
bundles of letters, fragmentary or rat-eaten manu- 
scripts, found by chance, or given to the writer in 
keeping, are brushed aside as cheap and silly. Fielding 
throws off the mask of anonymity, steps out boldly, 
and asks us to accept his omniscience and omni- 
presence. 

Before Fielding the localization of scene did not 
greatly trouble the story-teller or his reader. Arcadia 
would do. There were, however, some early attempts 
at a real background. Aphra Behn gave a smattering 
of local color to her 'Oroonoko.^ The scenes of 
Pamela's struggles and marriage bliss are on her lord's 
estates in Bedfordshire and Lincolnshire. Vague as 
are these outlines, their comparative definiteness was 
one of the delights of E-ichardson's first novel, and 
literary pilgrims wandered about in search of the pond 
where Pamela meditated suicide. The adventures of 
Master Joseph Andrews and Mr. Abraham Adams took 
place in England, somewhere in the west, at inns un- 
named. In ^Tom Jones,' Fielding more carefully 
considers the problem of geography, and in part works 
it out. He describes the country seat of Squire All- 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 47 

worthy as viewed from the terrace in early morning ; 
the Gothic mansion and the ^ ruined abbey grown over 
with ivy ' ; the lake at the foot of the hill from which 
issues the river, winding itself through woods and 
meadows until it empties into the sea. Over this wide 
prospect, unfolding it in detail after detail, rises the 
sun. One may easily follow Jones in his journey 
thence through Gloucester, Upton, Stratford, Dunstable, 
and St. Albans to Highgate, and thence by Gray's Inn 
Road to the Bull and Gate Inn in Holborn, and on 
to his lodgings in Bond Street. Fielding did rather 
more than give events a local habitation. Though he 
never professed any love for nature beyond a passion 
for the sea, never quite understanding Thomson, yet it 
is evident that he had been impressed and moved to 
rapture by the loveliness of the western downs. ' At 
Esher, at Stowe, at Wilton, at Estbury, and at Prior's 
Park,' he makes one of his characters say, ^ days are 
too short for the ravished imagination.' It is, of 
course, too early for a minute observation of nature : 
that has come in its completeness only with the ad- 
vance of science; but in his moon-lit hills, his parks 
and avenues of elms and beeches, and his clouds 
rolling up in ^ variegated mansions,' Pielding, in a 
tentative way, indicated the place that nature might 
occupy in the novel of the future. 

A characteristic of ^ Joseph Andrews,' Fielding de- 
velops more carefully in ^Tom Jones,' and at more 
regular intervals, — those initial chapters, in which he 
chats of his art, his purpose, and his fame. These 
essays were passed over by the eighteenth-century 
French translators of Fielding (so far as I am 
acquainted with them), who could not appreciate the 



48 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

art of Fielding any more than that of Shakespeare. 
Some recent English novelists, too, who have learned 
the technique of their art from the French, find it 
against their literary conscience to indulge in the ex- 
cursus; and, as Mr. Howells and Mr. James, they 
publish in little books by themselves treatises on the 
art of fiction, keeping silent on the pleasing question 
of fame. But in Fielding's large conception of a 
novel, these introductory chapters form a distinctive 
part; they are the chorus of the drama interpreting 
the meaning of the passing incidents, or they are 
monologues and asides of the author turned player 
when he wishes to take the audience into his con- 
fidence. 

It was in these introductory chapters and other 
digressions that Fielding found a place for that poetry 
which the Euphuists tried to incorporate into fiction. 
I have in mind that invocation prefixed to the thir- 
teenth book of ^Tom Jones,' where Fielding runs so 
delightfully from the serious to the gay and back 
again from the gay to the serious; and the passage 
in the second chapter of the third book — the high- 
water mark of restrained eloquence — where he 
alludes to his wife, then dead some years : — 



Reader, perhaps thou hast seen the statue of the Venus de 
Medicis. Perhaps, too, thou hast seen the gallery of beauties 
at Hampton Court. Thou mayest remember each bright 
Churchill of the galaxy, and all the toasts of the Kit-cat. Or, 
if their reign was before thy times, at least thou hast seen their 
daughters, the no less dazzling beauties of the present age; 
whose names, should we here insert, we apprehend they would 
fill the whole volume. Now, if thou hast seen all these, be not 
afraid of the rude answer which Lord Rochester once gave to 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 49 

a man who had seen many things. No. If thou hast seen all 
these without knowing what beauty is, thou hast no eyes ; if 
without feeling its power, thou hast no heart. Yet is it possible, 
my friend, that thou mayest have seen all these without being 
able to form an exact idea of Sophia ; for she did not exactly 
resemble any of them. She was most like the picture of Lady 
Ranelagh, and I have heard more still to the famous Duchess 
of Mazarine ; but most of all she resembled one whose image 
never can depart from my breast. . . . 

In deference to those who believe in the ^ a-moral ' 
in art, it would be agreeable to omit any special dis- 
quisition on the ethics of the novelist. This course is 
impossible. Dealing as it must with real men and 
women in the real relations of life, the novel of 
character could at no period have appeared as a new 
form of literature without its ethics ; but coming into 
life as it did in the middle of the eighteenth century, 
it was inevitable that it should come laden with an 
obvious moral. The essay and the drama from which 
it drew so much had been moralized. On the other 
hand, the clergy had become derelict in their duty; 
hence the schism in the Church of England led by 
Wesley. Richardson stepped forward to give the 
people examples of right conduct and to add a moral 
code. Fielding followed him, first to ridicule him, 
with the license of Harlequin, and then to criticise 
him in sincerity, with ^all the wit and humor of 
which he was master.' In the moral teaching of 
Addison and Eichardson the emphasis was placed 
upon mere conduct, and motives so far as they were 
appealed to were prudential. Do right, that you may 
prosper in this world and hope for felicity in the 
next. That is the general impression gained from 
their writings. As worked out in Richardson's first 



50 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

novel, in which Pamela triumphant sits by the side 
of her would-be betrayer, now her adored and adoring 
husband, in a coach behind 'the dappled Flanders 
mares,^ the doctrine of moral expediency was pushed 
to the ludicrous. Fielding appealed to higher motives 
for right conduct, and in doing so never quite forgot 
Richardson. In the dedication to ' Tom Jones,' 
written after the novel was completed, he says, 'I 
have shown that no acquisitions of guilt can com- 
pensate the loss of that solid inward comfort of mind, 
which is the sure companion of innocence and virtue ; 
nor can in the least balance the evil of that horror 
and anxiety which, in their room, guilt introduces 
into our bosoms.' Virtue, then, is its own reward in 
the peace that ensues, and vice carries, with the con- 
sequential disturbed conscience, its own punishment. 

This is a complete repudiation of Eichardson, if 
not of Addison ; the point of view has shifted from 
the objective to the subjective, from doing to being, 
and the shifting means war against formalism. In 
withering irony Fielding illustrates his point in the 
characters of Mr. Square and Mr. Thwackum ; the one 
tests every act by a vague formula of the Deists, ' the 
unalterable rule of right and the eternal fitness of 
things ' ; the other by the statutory mandates of re- 
ligion, — and ' by religion he means the Christian 
religion ; and not only the Christian religion, but the 
Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant re- 
ligion, but the Church of England.' Both philoso- 
pher and theologian in their easy assurance have left 
out of their reckoning * the natural goodness of the 
heart.' And to confound and to dismay them and all 
other casuists, Fielding leads into their presence Mr. 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 51 

Tom Jones, generous, chivalrous, and soft-hearted, but 
lamentably weak in some phases of his conduct, and 
asks, what will you do with him ? This eighteenth- 
century gentleman, as Fielding himself well knew, can 
hardly be defended. Emotions and impulses cannot 
be relied upon as infallible guides in conduct; at 
times it is necessary to listen to a sterner and less 
pleasing voice, and to that voice Tom Jones was deaf. 
But we may surely mark Fielding's protest against 
the letter of the law, and point to the fact that with 
^ Tom Jones ' the novel not only definitely assumes 
a new form, but a new ethics much more respectable 
than that founded upon utilitarianism and formulated 
in ' beautiful and edifying maxims.' 

In ' Tom Jones ' character and incident are brought 
into equilibrium. In 'Joseph Andrews' the main 
thing with Fielding was burlesque adventure ; for its 
sake characters were sketched, and with the result 
that incident and character were often incongruous. 
In 1749 Fielding would not have thrown a Parson 
Adams among the swine or dipped him in a tub of 
water. ' Tom Jones ' has its burlesque, — some of the 
finest examples in our language, — but as in that 
famous battle in the village churchyard it in no way 
militates against the conservation of character. To 
many scenes of the novel the imagination undoubt- 
edly does not give its assent; such, for example, is 
the scene where Mr. Allworthy, suffering from a severe 
cold, imagines that he is going to die, and takes leave 
of his friends and servants in eloquent phrases remem- 
bered from the Stoics. The novelist has of course to 
adapt character to incident and incident to character, 
and though he be a Fielding, his success will not be 



52 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

uniform. In * Tom Jones ' Fielding for the most part 
concealed his art, and approached the highest ideal 
of a novel, in which the plot takes its coloring from 
the characters themselves, as if both plot and char- 
acters were of simultaneous birth in the imagina- 
tion. 

As a novel of character, ' Tom Jones ' belongs to 
that class of novels which Walter Bagehot called 
ubiquitous, the aim of which is to present by a 
multitude of characters a complete picture of human 
life. Fielding begins his character building in Somer- 
setshire with Squire Allworthy, Squire Western, Tom 
Jones, young Blifil, Sophia, a philosopher, a clergy- 
man, a doctor, a housekeeper, and a gamekeeper. He 
starts Jones on a journey to London, introducing 
chance acquaintances by the way. In more hurried 
journeys Jones is followed by Sophia and Allworthy 
and Western. When Fielding gets them to London, 
he brings them into contrast with the more highly 
seasoned men and women of the town, as represented 
by Lord Fellamar and Lady Bellaston. The immense 
canvas, when filled, contains forty figures. 

Now, in what respects are Fielding's characters 
nearer life than those in the fiction before him? 
And how far are they still unreal ? Cervantes and 
Lesage had aimed at types rather than individuals; 
so, too, had Moliere ; so, too, to some extent had the 
Restoration dramatists, their immediate successors, 
and Steele and Addison. The characters of the Eng- 
lish dramatists and essayists wear such placards as 
Vainlove, Fondlewife, Maskwell, Lady Touchwood, 
Lord Foppington, Ned Softly, Will Honeycomb. 
These figures are not all types ; they are frequently 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 53 

imaginary beings, who affect some humor or passion 
to which they are supposed to be naturally inclined. 
Here is Fielding's starting-point in character building. 
All his characters are constructed on a further de- 
velopment of the art of the comic dramatist. He 
would illustrate by means of a large number of men 
and women taken from various spheres in life, the 
manifestations of affectation as darkened by avarice, 
self-interest, deceit, or heartlessness, and as softened 
by justice, mercy, courtesy, or generosity. The danger 
in working upon such a theory is that the outcome 
will not be, as was intended, individuals, but after 
all, types, or worse still, abstractions. Fielding's wide 
and careful observation of real life was his great 
corrective; and yet that Fielding quite succeeded in 
his purpose is probably not true. Allworthy is gener- 
osity hardly moulded into a type; young Blifil is 
black deceit hardly moulded into a type ; and in the 
character of Tom Jones himself. Fielding is laboring 
a little too hard to maintain a psychological impos- 
sibility ; for goodness of heart and failure in execution 
do not for long go hand in hand. There is also a 
good deal in Fielding that was already conventional. 
His Mrs. Towwouse, Lady Booby, and Mrs. Slipslop 
belong to the comic drama rather than to the novel. 
Trusting implicitly in Cervantes, Fielding seemed to 
think there is some causal connection between nobility 
and grotesque manners. No doubt every country has 
its Don Quixotes ; England had them in the eighteenth 
century, in the elder Lyttelton and in Ralph Allen, 
the postmaster at Bath. Still, in making exceptional 
and Quixotic characters like these representative of 
the better side of human nature, Fielding lent to his 



54 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

portrait of eighteenth-century manners a want of sym- 
metry and harmony. His best character is Squire 
Western. Addison had sketched the Tory fox-hunter, 
clothing him in the characteristics of the class, 
^that he might give his readers an image of these 
rural statesmen.' Squire Western has all the dis- 
tinguishing marks of Addison's type, and beyond 
this, he is individualized. He is a Somerset squire, 
such as Fielding must have known, speaking a 
Southern dialect ; he is humanized by a love for his 
daughter, 'whom next to his hounds and his horses 
he esteems above all the world.' Of course, all his 
traits are heightened for comic effect. One cannot 
quite reach the actual by the path of ridicule. At 
least, after ' Tom Jones ' there remained for the novel- 
ist other points of view. 

'Amelia,' Fielding's last novel, appeared in 1751, 
and differs greatly in many ways from all the rest. 
It was a movement toward the specific in art and 
consequently toward realism. Fielding specializes 
his satire, selecting as his point of attack the glorious 
constitution of England. Many of the laws, made to 
prevent crime, have their loopholes through which 
the criminal escapes ; others of them are unjust, and 
entail suffering on the innocent. Furthermore, the 
agents of the law are incompetent. The court pre- 
sided over by Mr. Thrasher, who cannot read the 
laws he must interpret and administer, is a scene of 
open bribery and outrageous injustice. The house 
of Mr. Bondman the bailiff is a place for fleecing the 
wretched. Newgate, through the laxity of its disci- 
pline, instead of being a prison for the punishment 
of crime or the reformation of the criminal, has been 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 55 

turned into a place of diversion, riot, and sensuality. 
Every administrator of the law has his price, which 
is gauged according to the pocket of the malefactor. 
Now Fielding feels the absurdity of all this, and 
lights up these scenes with his most brilliant mock- 
ery; but his satire has a new intensity. It is not 
precisely the Fielding who wrote ' Tom Jones ' that 
is speaking ; it is Fielding the Bow street justice who 
had delivered an impressive charge to the Westmin- 
ster grand jury. The younger Fielding had seen one 
side of vice, its gayety and its flaunts ; he now sees 
the other side, its loathsomeness and its enervation. 
As in 'Tom Jones,' he brings before the imagination 
the masquerade, with its glaring lights and its rich and 
fantastic costumes, but for a new purpose — to place 
his finger on the libertinage beneath. In Vauxhall 
gardens, poor Amelia, enraptured 'by the delicious 
sweetness of the place and the enchanting charms of 
the music, fancies herself in those delicious mansions 
we hope to enjoy hereafter,' only in a moment to be 
disillusioned by the profanity and jests of a pair of 
sparks who rudely address her. In the severe realism 
of scenes of this kind, in his denunciation of duels 
and gaming, and in his dealing with all moral ques- 
tions, Fielding has turned Puritan. 

As a natural result of this new standpoint, the 
characters are brought nearer to real life than in 
' Tom Jones.' Sophia had been ushered upon the 
stage in a cloud of eloquence and in a shower of 
poetic fragments from Suckling and Dr. Donne. 
Amelia is the plain, patient, forgiving housewife with 
a visible scar on her nose. To his harlots and liber- 
tines, Fielding now adds those revolting touches which 



56 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

accompany the latter end of vice — obesity and dis- 
ease and the disfigured face. 

Indeed, the main situation in ' Amelia ' is the favor- 
ite one of the modern realist. ' Joseph Andrews ' and 
^Tom Jones' had been brought to a close, after the 
analogy of romantic comedy, by a marriage. The last 
novel of Fielding's begins where they end, and only 
by way of retrospect are we told of the courtship and 
elopement of Booth and Amelia. It is the story of 
the hard lot of a woman of high breeding who has 
married for love a poor lieutenant. Owing to the 
husband's passion for gambling, and the wrongs of 
others, they are thrown upon London with a lieu- 
tenant's half-pay as their only income. Its scenes, 
described in stern and hard reality, are those of the 
miserable lodging-house, the sponging-house, the pawn- 
shop, Newgate, and the homes of the disreputable 
London aristocracy. The most memorable are : ' Booth 
lying along on the floor, and his little things crawling 
and playing about him,' to be interrupted by the 
bailiffs ; and Amelia in the kitchen and the children 
playing about her, as she is preparing the favorite 
dishes of a husband who will soon return to tell her 
that he cannot sup with her to-night. The wretched 
family sink lower and lower into poverty and squalor ; 
the last guinea and the jewels and dresses of Amelia 
have gone to pay gambling debts, and Booth is con- 
fined to the bailiff's house, when they are rescued by 
the good Dr. Harrison, the deus ex madiind, of the 
drama, and restored to their rightful fortune ; and 
all who have wronged them are duly punished. Had 
Fielding worked out his situation to its logical con- 
clusion; had he transported Booth to the West Indies ; 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 57 

had he turned Amelia with her children into the street, 
or given her over as mistress to Colonel James — all 
of which he suggests in the course of his story, — he 
would have anticipated the relentless debdcle of natu- 
ralism. The infinite tenderness of Fielding, soon to 
bid a most pathetic farewell to his children and then 
to life, was mightier than the logic of art. 

3. The Novel versus the Drama 

With the publication of ^ Clarissa Harlowe ' and 
^Tom Jones,' the novel has found its art and fit 
subject-matter. They are, broadly speaking, realistic 
novels, for their aim is to represent the outer and the 
inner life somewhat as they are. The novel as Rich- 
ardson left it was a sober dissection of the heart. 
With Fielding, it was perhaps a no less serious effort, 
though its purpose was clouded by extravagant wit 
and humor. Richardson was reaching the inner life 
through sentimentalism ; Fielding through our vices 
and follies. Because of their aim at the truth to 
outer fact and appearance, ' Tom Jones ' and ' Clarissa 
Harlowe ' are novels of manners. They are likewise 
our first dramatic novels, for they show that the 
novel, as well as the drama, can deal with the great 
passions ; and in their direct presentation of conversa- 
tion and in the management of plot, they are dramatic. 
As dramatic novels, they are novels of character; 
and as such they have in part, though not wholly, 
distinct antecedents. Richardson is in the line of the 
romances, the Arthurian cycle, 'Amadis de Gaula,' 
'Clelie,' and ^Marianne'; Fielding is in the line of 
the fabliau, the picaresque novel, and the burlesque 



58 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

adventure. Both gathered into their conception of a 
novel elements from other sources. The character- 
sketch came to them fully developed from Addison 
and Steele. Fielding adopted the essayist's stand- 
point of general in distinction from personal satire. 
From the essayists, both Eichardson and Fielding had 
to some extent ready constructed for them the scenes 
most suitable for their actions, the playhouse, the 
masquerade, and the squire's country seat. Both 
turned to the drama and its ancient critic for sugges- 
tions for plan, development, and denouement of their 
plots. For comedy, Richardson turned to Steele's 
^ Conscious Lovers ' — a moral disquisition arranged 
in dialogue ; and for tragedy, apparently to Otway's 
^Orphan.' Fielding turned to the light, gay, and 
burlesque comedy of Moliere and Congreve. Ele- 
ments so varied each in the heat of his imagination 
welded into something quite new. 

For doing this work in England, conditions were 
most favorable. We have never drawn between liter- 
ary forms the fixed lines of the ancients or of France 
since Racine. The drama of Shakespeare had some- 
thing of the ubiquity of the novel; it was founded 
upon prose-fiction and chronicle history. Its scenes 
were shifted from place to place; the period of its 
action might extend over the time necessary for 
infants to grow into youth ; and its dramatis personoe 
might crowd the stage to its full physical capacity: 
there councils were held, courts convened, mobs ad- 
dressed, and battles fought. Its plot might consist 
of two dramatic fables, each complete in itself, having 
points of contact here and there and finally blended 
in the fifth act ; and full play was given to both sides 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 59 

of life, the tragic and the comic. As the democratic 
ideas of the Reformation more and more prevailed in 
English life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu- 
ries, the drama came under their influence ; and before 
Richardson wrote, it had become thoroughly bourgeois. 
What interested an age which drove a king into exile 
and whose fathers had beheaded another, was not the 
crash of a royal house, nor the passions of kings 
and princes, but the pathos of everyday life ; and it 
demanded of the playwright the familiar domestica 
facta. Terror was banished from tragedy, and wit 
and humor from comedy, and their places were taken 
by long-drawn-out scenes of distress. As a conse- 
quence, the drama lost its rapid movement, and soon 
ceased to be at all. Dramatic representations con- 
tinued, but where they were not melodramas or imita- 
tions of Restoration comedy, they were, in their slow 
development of plot, their analysis, and their moraliz- 
ing, either essays in dramatic form, or already sen- 
timental novels, rather than tragedies or comedies. 
The novelist was thus from one point of view but 
continuing a process that had already begun. 

Though the English drama and novel have many 
characteristics in common, there are differences which 
mark the species. To the length of a play there are 
fixed limits. The audience expects that a dramatic 
action shall extend over not less than two and not 
more than three hours. To the novel there is prac- 
tically no time limit ; it may consist of one page or 
of a thousand pages. Unless the dramatist takes 
himself as a character, he can give his own views 
of the world and of life only by his choice of sub- 
ject and the tone of his treatment; he cannot speak 



60 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

directly except in burlesque comedy. The novelist 
may stop and talk about Ms characters. Have not 
the excursions of Fielding their psychologic founda- 
tion in the glee he felt at his enfranchisement from 
the conventions of comedy ? The environment of a 
dramatic action is restricted; the stage of one of the 
largest Elizabethan theatres was only forty-three 
feet wide and fifty-five feet deep. The novelist builds 
his own stage; it may be for only a small group of 
characters, as in a tale of Hawthorne's ; it may be for 
above three hundred characters, as in ^Pickwick.' 
The dramatist can only suggest scenery ; the novelist 
may hang his interior with the landscapes of Salvator 
Eosa, as did Scott. A detailed study in moral decay 
is well-nigh impossible in the drama ; for we have an 
imaginative difficulty in circumscribing by the events 
of a short evening the utter break-up of character, 
which in real life is the work of a long period ; and 
asides and monologues, however dexterously managed, 
can be only a partial substitute for the novelist's full 
disclosure of what is passing in head and heart. 

These differences, however, are not fundamental, as 
they are often asserted to be. The limitations of the 
drama, genius, aided by great actors, has in a measure 
overcome. By creating an illusion in the imagination 
of the spectator, Shakespeare expands his stage to 
hold an action of epic magnitude ; by his clear pres- 
entation of the significant moments in his hero's 
career, he makes it possible for his audience to supply 
details he himself is forced to suppress, and in a few 
lines he conjures up for them the splendor of an 
Italian night. Does there exist a fundamental dis- 
tinction between the drama and the novel ? On this 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 61 

question, Goethe and Brunetiere liave speculated to 
essentially the same conclusion, which is only in gen- 
eral true. Goethe says : ^ In the novel it is chiefly 
sentiments and events that are exhibited; in the 
drama, it is characters and deeds/ ^ Note the antithe- 
sis of events and deeds (Begebenheiten und Thaten). 
The hero of the serious drama, both among the Greeks 
and the moderns, is, with few exceptions, a character 
of tremendous energy of will. He has some purpose 
to accomplish: he would avenge the death of a kins- 
man, or he would usurp a throne, and we watch him 
to see in what manner he will proceed. However 
much he may delay (and there is probably method in 
his delay), the time comes when he squarely meets 
events, placing the issue upon the prowess of his arm. 
The drama is thus a duel between the individual and 
opposing forces, a challenge to the utterance, and the 
freedom of the individual we must not question down 
to and including the moment he succeeds or falls. 
The novel came into existence when Europe, chastened 
by its hard experience and its experimental philoso- 
phy, by Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, was losing faith 
in the ideal man who fashions his career as he wills, 
when an audience (said Miss Sarah Fielding) sat un- 
moved as Cato fell upon his sword, but wept to see 
Dry den's Dorax and Sebastian embrace after their 
quarrel. And what does this mean ? That the stand- 
point from which life is viewed is no longer exactly 
the same as it was in the glad Elizabethan age ; man 
is no longer the master of his destiny; what he is 
and what he becomes is determined by his environ- 

1 ' Wilhelm Meisters Lelirjalire,' Carlyle's translation, bk. v. 
ch. vii. 



62 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

ment quite as much as by himself; pathos is in life 
itself, and, if in death, certainly not in the voluntary 
death of a Cato. The novel is an expression of the 
philosophic and less inspiring view. In the novel 
our attention is drawn to the force of events that 
constrain our activity. The hero of the novel (though 
we hardly have the right to call any character in the 
novel a hero) is not so active as the dramatic one. 
Hard circumstances hedge him in, and press about 
him as do the serpents about Laocoon. Upon his 
dependencies our attention is concentrated. He may 
be crushed as is Clarissa, or through a turn of events 
he may stand untrammelled once more as does Tom 
Jones ; but in either case, he himself is not the main 
force that has had to do with his making or his un- 
making ; there are events which lie beyond his arm, 
and which have a law or mode of their own. There 
is, it is true, a similar network closing in upon the 
dramatic hero, but if he is freed, he frees himself ; if 
he is overwhelmed, it is the result of a course of 
action he has deliberately chosen. This difference 
between the novel and the drama is not precisely 
fundamental ; like all others, it is rather one of degree 
or of preponderating motive. The tragedies of Shake- 
speare, notably 'Hamlet,' vacillate between the idea 
of liberty and the idea of restraint. And George 
Eliot built her novels on crises very like dramatic 
moments. And yet our drama certainly fell into utter 
decay in the eighteenth centmy because no writer 
then living was able, or at least disposed, to recon- 
struct it in accord with the prevailing view of life ; in 
which there was an element, largely unconscious, of 
vague determinism that only incidentally showed it- 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 63 

self in the noble spiritual freedom of the Elizabethan 
age. And the novel then supplanted the drama be- 
cause, in its large scope and style, it could easily 
analyze minutely the interplay of event and character. 

4. Tobias Smollett 

The first novels of Tobias Smollett appeared when 
Richardson and Fielding were doing their maturest 
work. ' Eoderick Eandom ' (1748) immediately fol- 
lows ^Clarissa Harlowe,' and immediately precedes 
^ Tom Jones.' ^ Peregrine Pickle ' (1751) falls between 
^ Tom Jones ' and ' Amelia.' ^ The Adventures of Ferdi- 
nand, Count Pathom ' was published in 1753. Smol- 
lett's other novels belong to a later period. ^ The 
Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves ' — a too patent 
imitation of ' Don Quixote ' — was published in 1762, 
and ' Humphry Clinker ' in 1771. 

Smollett and Fielding professed the same source of 
inspiration — Spain. The Spanish picaresque stories 
of Aleman, Cervantes, Quevedo, and others, and the 
French offshoots of them by Sorel, Scarron, and Fure- 
tiere had all found their way into English. Begin- 
ning with ' The Fraternity of Vagabonds ' (1561) by 
John Awdeley, there was a long line of English pica- 
resque sketches and stories extending down to Defoe. 
Fielding evidently read considerably in this fiction, 
and Smollett evidently read all at his command, 
whether Spanish, French, or English. More particu- 
larly, both Smollett and Fielding informed the reader 
that their models were Cervantes and Lesage. As a 
result. Fielding and Smollett have much in common ; 
a novel, as they conceived of it, is a union of intrigue 



64 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

and adventure. But in the disposition of their mate- 
rial they were far apart. Fielding when at his best 
grouped and arranged incidents for dramatic effect, 
with his final chapter in view. Smollett, too, brought 
his stories to a close in the manner of ^ Tom Jones,' 
with a marriage and a description of the charms of 
the bride ; yet there was no logic in this ; it was 
merely a mechanical device for stopping somewhere. 
Smollett's novels are strings of adventure and per- 
sonal histories, and it is not quite clear to the reader 
why they might not be shufEed into any other succes- 
sion than the one they have assumed. A literary 
form cannot exist without its art. If a fable may 
drift along at the pleasure of an author, with the 
episode thrust in at will, then anybody can write a 
novel. This inference was drawn by the contempo- 
raries of Smollett. Between 1750 and 1770 the press 
was burdened with slipshod adventures, the writers 
of which did not possess Smollett's picturesqueness 
and immense strength of style. The novel thus put 
into the hands of the mob ceased to be a serious lit- 
erary product ; and, in consequence, its decline was 
rapid from what it was as left by Kichardson and 
Fielding. 

Fielding based his art as humorist and realist on 
the commonplace observation that we are not what 
we seem. His province as novelist was to remove 
the mask of affectation, that we may be seen as we 
really are. Except where his motive is purely lit- 
erary, as in ^ Jonathan Wild,' his principal characters 
are never ^ sordid and vicious ' ; his Trulliber and Blifil 
come only by the way. Smollett, in his first novels, 
puts first 'the selfishness, envy, malice, and base in- 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 65 

difference of mankind ' ; he does not strip his rogues, 
for they are stripped when introduced ; he at once ex- 
poses to view ^ those parts of life where the humors 
and passions are undisguised by affectation, ceremony, 
or education.' The least varnished scenes in our fic- 
tion are in * Eoderick Random ' : the flogging of Dr. 
Syntax, the impressment of Eoderick, Dr. Macshane's 
review of the sick on the quarter-deck of the Thun- 
der, and the duel between Eoderick and Midshipman 
Crampley. It was the boast of Smollett that in draw- 
ing them ^ nature is appealed to in every particular.' 
In ^Peregrine Pickle' and ^ Count Fathom,' he is 
equally outspoken, but there his realism is somewhat 
artificial ; he is writing to order for a public who find 
humor in the practical joke, or who would like to 
see refurbished those scenes in Eichardson between 

Lord B and Pamela. In his ruffianism, and 

his savage analysis of motive, Smollett intensifies, 
enforces, and completes the reaction against Eich- 
ardson. 

Yet Smollett's realism is marked by the spot of 
decay. All his first novels have one characteristic 
of the fictions of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood, Tom 
Brown, and numerous other early eighteenth-century 
writers : he crowds his pages with well-known char- 
acters of his own time, usually for the purpose of 
fierce satire. He is a Swift without Swift's clear 
and wide vision. He ridicules Pielding for marrying 
his ' cook-maid ' ; Akenside — a respectable poet and 
scholar — is a mere ' index-hunter who holds the eel 
of science by the tail ' ; Garrick is ^ a parasite and 
buffoon, whose hypocrisy is only equalled by his ava- 
rice ' ; Lyttelton is ' a dunce ' ; he insults Newcastle, 



66 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Bute, and Pitt, and sneers at his king, and the ^ sweet 
princes of the royal blood.' In making his characters 
at will the mouthpiece of his venom, he takes no pains 
to preserve their consistency; and frequently, under 
the excitement of his ferocious hate, he forgets they 
are there, and speaks out in his own name. This 
kind of work, though done brilliantly and under the 
inspiration of robust indignation, does not form a 
novel. The logical outcome was his own ' History of 
an Atom ' and Charles Johnstone's ' Adventures of a 
Guinea' — pamphlets and libels in extenso. 

In the debris of the novel thus wrecked by Smollett, 
there are new scenes and characters. ^ Roderick Ran- 
dom' is our first novel of the sea. Defoe and the 
romancers and the picaresque writers before him 
transferred imaginary adventure to an imaginary 
sea. It remained for Smollett to bring into the 
novel the real sea, a real ship, a real voyage, and 
the real English tars. As an example of Smollett's 
realism. Lieutenant Bowling may be contrasted with 
Crusoe : ' He was a strong built man, somewhat bandy- 
legged, with a neck like that of a bull, and a face 
which (you might easily perceive) had withstood the 
most obstinate assaults of the weather.' He has 
forgotten the language of landsmen and speaks only 
the ' seamen's phrase ' ; had the occasion occurred, he 
would have fought and died at his post with the cheer- 
fulness of a Grenville. The English sailor lingers 
on in ^Peregrine Pickle' and ^Humphry Clinker.' 
In the former appears Commodore Trunnion, Smol- 
lett's most amusing seaman, who, retiring into the 
country with Lieutenant Hatchway and Tom Pipes, 
turns his house into a garrison; and, after nursing 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 67 

his whims and superstitions for a period of years, 
dies in a hiccough and a groan. Smollett's land 
characters are as novel as his seamen ; his Scotchmen, 
his Irishmen, his Welshmen, and his Jews, — drawn 
at full length, as Lieutenant Lishmahago, or charac- 
terized by a happy phrase, as the Scotch schoolmaster 
who advertises to teach Englishmen the correct 
pronunciation of the English language. They are 
caricature types, at once professional and national. 
As national types they are the first in English fiction. 

The author of 'Humphry Clinker' is also the 
exponent of a new kind of humor. Written while 
Smollett was dying at Leghorn, the novel is milder 
in tone than the rest ; fierce satire has disappeared. 
Though thrown together like his other novels, it is 
most brilliant in conception. Matthew Bramble, a 
bachelor well on in years, the master of Brambleton 
Hall in Monmouthshire, is a sufferer from the gout 
and many imaginary diseases. At the advice of his 
physician. Dr. Lewis, he takes a circular tour through 
England and Scotland for his health, visiting Bath, 
London, Scarborough, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and the 
Western Highlands. He is accompanied by his 
shrewish sister Tabitha Bramble, her dog Chowder, 
her maid Winifred Jenkins, and his niece and nephew. 
Miss Lydia Melford and Mr. Jeremiah Melford. 
Smollett's object is to excite continuous laughter by 
farcical situations. The novel thus announces the 
broad comedy of Dickens, so different from the pure 
comedy of Fielding, and best characterized by funny, 
a word then just coming into use. 

Smollett, however, is never merely funny. In this 
one instance he tells his story by means of letters 



68 DEVELOPMENT OE THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

from the various characters to their various friends, 
in which the same scenes are described as viewed by 
a hypochondriac, a man of the world, a sentimental 
young woman, an aged spinster seeking a husband, 
and a waiting-maid who has never before crossed the 
Severn. Lydia thus writes of Ranelagh to her friend 
Laetitia : — 

Ranelagh looks like the enchanted palace of a genie, adorned 
with the most exquisite performances of painting, carving, and 
gilding, enlightened with a thousand golden lamps that emulate 
the noonday sun ; crowded with the great, the rich, the gay, the 
happy, and the fair ; glittering with cloth of gold and silver, 
lace, embroidery, and precious stones. While these exulting 
sons and daughters of felicity tread this round of pleasure, or 
regale in different parties and separate lodges, with fine imperial 
tea and other delicious refreshments, their ears are entertained 
with the most ravishing delights of music, both instrumental 
and vocal. 

Then Matthew Bramble gives his impression of 
Ranelagh in a letter to Dr. Lewis: — 

What are the amusements at Ranelagh ? One half of the 
company are following one another in an eternal circle ; like so 
many blind asses in an olive-mill, where they can neither 
discourse, distinguish, nor be distinguished ; while the other 
half are drinking hot water, under the denomination of tea, 
till nine or ten o'clock at night, to keep them awake for the 
rest of the evening. As for the orchestra, the vocal music 
especially, it is well for the performers that they cannot be 
heard distinctly. 

This is comedy become philosophic; it is comedy 
which arises (to use a popular current phrase) from 
profound insight into the relativity of knowledge. 

Finally, Smollett's novels look toward the new 
romance which was soon to displace the novel of 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTUEY REALISTS 69 

sentiment and ridicule. Smollett's imagination de- 
lighted in terror. A tragic gloom colors many a scene 
on board tlie Thunder, especially that one where 
Roderick, chained to the deck on a dark night, lies 
exposed to the furious broadside of a French man-of- 
war. It pervades ^ Count Fathom/ his most romantic 
novel ; and perhaps above all his scenes of horror, 
rises the midnight the count passes in the robbers' 
cave. Here are the shadows, the poniard, the bleeding 
corpse, the cold sweat, and the trance machinery which 
usher in Gothic romance. 

5. Laurence Sterne 

The claims of the Eev. Laurence Sterne to be classed 
among the novelists rest upon ^The Life and Opin- 
ions of Tristram Shandy, Gent.,' in nine duodec- 
imo volumes (1759-67), and ^ A Sentimental Journey 
through France and Italy,' in two duodecimo volumes 
(1768). Both productions are incomplete. 

This York prebendary, when in full middle life, 
pulled off his wig, and assumed the cap and bells 
once worn by that ^fellow of infinite jest' who pre- 
sided over the revels at the court of Hamlet, king of 
Denmark. Of the practical jokes of which he is the 
father, one of the most exquisite is, that thirty years 
after the publication of ^Tristram Shandy,' it was 
gravely announced by Dr. John Ferriar, in his learned 
' Illustrations of Sterne ' that ' poor Yorick ' had stolen 
his most eloquent passages, his droll turns of expres- 
sion, his whims and his fancies, from the Schoolmen, 
from Rabelais and French jest-books, and especially 
from Bishop Hall and 'Anatomy of Melancholy' 



70 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Burton. By far too much has been made of these 
* thefts' by Scott and succeeding biographers of Sterne. 
They were in part known to Voltaire and Lessing, 
who had too fine a sense of the ridiculous to insist 
upon them. When we give ourselves into the keeping 
of the king's jester, we do well to be on the alert. 

Sterne, like all writers, had his antecedents; and 
some of them were very remote from his time. He 
has furnished the reader of ^Tristram Shandy' with 
a very full list of them, in which are his ' dear Eabe- 
lais and dearer Cervantes.' He found in old English 
and French humorists a body of stories, jests, and 
witticisms, — learned, heavy, quaint, and salacious, — 
and he helped himself. He might, like honest Burton, 
^ have given every man his own,' but it was his whim 
not to do so. The contribution of the ^Anatomy' to 
^ Shandy,' in respect to suggestion and actual material, 
is immense. The influence of Cervantes on Sterne 
was all pervading; when a friend criticised him for 
describing too minutely Slop's fall in ' Shandy,' Sterne 
appealed, not to nature, not to the laws of the imagi- 
nation, but to Cervantes. Eabelais led him to seek 
wit in questionable sources. He also drew freely 
upon a group of Queen Anne wits, of which Swift 
was the centre. For the general plan of ^Tristram 
Shandy,' he was surely indebted to the ' Memoirs of 
Martinus Scriblerus,' written mostly by Dr. John 
Arbuthnot, and first published with Pope's prose 
works, in 1741. ^Martinus Scriblerus' is a satire in 
the Cervantic manner on ^ the abuses of human learn- 
ing.' Its out-of-the-way medical knowledge, its ac- 
count of the birth of Scriblerus, its disquisitions on 
playthings and education — all have their more Quix- 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 71 

otic counterpart in the first volumes of ^ Shandy.' The 
purpose of Sterne, however, is not satire, except per- 
haps in the delineation of Dr. Slop; he is trying to 
see how much sport he can get out of good-natured 
men who have lost their wits by their learning. 

The formlessness of Smollett becomes with Sterne 
an affectation. The title, 'The Life and Opinions of 
Tristram Shandy, Gent.,' is a misnomer. Tristram is 
not born until near the end of the third volume, and 
he is not put into breeches until the sixth. Sterne 
deserts his characters in the most ridiculous situations," 
— Mrs. Shandy with ear placed against the keyhole, 
Walter and Toby conversing on the stairway, — and 
runs off into digression after digression, which are 
called 'the sunshine, the life, and the soul of read- 
ing.' He tampers with his pagination, and abounds 
in dashes, asterisks, index-hands, and ' and-so-f orths ' ; 
he leaves entire chapters for the imagination of the 
reader to construct, and then unexpectedly returns 
to these blanks, filling them in himself; he writes 
a sentence and calls it a chapter ; or begins a chapter, 
breaks off suddenly, and starts in anew; and of one 
of his volumes he plots the curve, showing twistings, 
retrogressions, and plungings. Nothing was left for 
Sterne's imitators but to write their words upside 
down. Undoubtedly there is method in this mad- 
ness. Sterne was not a careless or hasty writer; 
he selected and presented his material with infinite 
pains. ' I have burnt,' he writes ambiguously in one 
of his letters, ' more wit than I have published.' But 
it was a sad day for English fiction when a writer of 
genius came to look upon the novel as the repository 
for the crotchets of a lifetime. This is the more to 



72 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

be lamented when we reflect that Sterne, unlike SmoL 
lett, could tell a story in a straightforward manner 
when he chose to do so. Had the time he wasted in 
dazzling his friends with literary fireworks been de- 
voted to a logical presentation of the wealth of his ex- 
periences, fancies, and feelings, he might have written 
one of the most perfect pieces of compositions in the 
English language. As it is, the novel in his hands, 
considered from the standpoint of structure, reverted 
to what it was when left by the wits of the Eenais- 
sance. 

There is, however, in Sterne a great though not a 
full compensation for his eccentricities of form. In 
passages now immortal, as that one in which the re- 
cording angel drops a tear upon an oath of Uncle 
Toby's, he strove to write prose that should possess 
the precision, the melody, and the sensuousness of the 
highest poetic expression. The proverb, ' God tempers 
the wind to the shorn lamb,' belongs in its present 
form to Sterne ; clergymen have taken it for a text 
to their sermons, and then searched the Scriptures 
for it in vain. In indicating delicate shades of feel- 
ing, he refined upon Marivaux and Fielding. And in 
the course of his work he created great and extraor- 
dinary characters. 

Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, all had the reputa- 
tion in their time of taking their leading characters 
from actual experience. Fielding selected, and, ex- 
cept in ^ Amelia,' made men and women conform to 
a theory of the ludicrous. Smollett drenched his 
rogues and seamen in a bath of indignation, brutal- 
ity, and revenge. Sterne was more an idealist than 
either. Characters which had a real basis in his boy- 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 73 

hood observations in English and Irish barracks, in his 
association with droll and not over-fastidious York- 
shire wits, and in his French travels, he lifted into ^ the 
clear climate of fantasy/ Hypocrisy, vanity, affecta- 
tion, and ruling passions — the material which Fielding 
and Smollett worked — he subtilized into the strangest 
whims; as, for example, the hobby that our whole 
success in life depends upon the name with which 
we happen to be christened. These faint shadows 
of real life, though they do speak, converse with us 
quite as much through attitude, gesture, and move- 
ment. Trim is discoursing upon life and death. ^ Are 
we not here now, continued the Corporal (striking the 
end of his stick perpendicularly upon the floor, so as 
to give an idea of health and stability) — and are 
we not — (dropping his hat upon the ground) gone! 
in a moment ! — 'Twas infinitely striking ! Susannah 
burst into a flood of tears.' Passages might be se- 
lected to show that Sterne was capable of descend- 
ing to the antics of a jester or to the pantomime of 
a Parisian music hall; but at his best, he displayed 
in the study of gesture a fine and liigh art. He en- 
larged for the novelist the sphere of character-build- 
ing, by bringing over into fiction the pose and the 
attitude of the sculptor and the painter, combined 
with a graceful and harmonious movement, which he 
justly likened to the transitions of music. 

Sterne's characters belong to that Shakespearean 
brotherhood of fools which Macaulay must have had 
in mind when he sketched Boswell. Mrs. Shandy on 
the famous 'bed of justice,' echoing her husband's 
observations on Tristram's need of breeches, is that 
delightfully stupid Justice Shallow who, standing by 



74 DEVELOPMENT OE THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Westminster Abbey, gave his assent to the absurd 
remarks of Falstaff and Pistol, with ' It doth ' and 
^ 'Tis so indeed.' Dr. Slop is of the dull and blun- 
dering class. Trim is the pragmatic fool, haunted at 
times by a deep philosophy. Walter Shandy is the 
learned fool, whose poor brain, involved in a labyrinth 
of a 2)riori reasoning, is now and then visited by 
gleams of intelligence. Listen to him on his favorite 
hypothesis : ' How many C^sars and Pompeys, he 
would say, by mere inspiration of the names, have 
been rendered worthy of them? And how many, he 
would add, are there, who might have done exceeding 
well in the world had not their characters and spirits 
been totally depressed and Nicodemused into nothing ! ' 
Uncle Toby is the innocent gentleman who knows 
nothing of the real world ; who sits in his sentry-box, 
pipe in hand, looking into Widow Wadman's left eye 
for ' moat or chaff or speck,' wholly unaware that it 
is ' one lambent, delicious fire,' shooting into his own. 
And in their kindness of heart, all Sterne's charac- 
ters are cousins to that Yorick whose lips Hamlet 
^ kissed how oft.' Walter Shandy, though sometimes 
assuming a subacid humor, never does so without a 
prick of conscience. Uncle Toby's heart goes out in 
sympathy for all in misfortune and distress. Aged 
and infirm as he is, he would walk through darkness 
and storm to console a dying soldier. Sterne writes : 

My Uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retaUate upon a fly. — 
Go — says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which 
had buzzed about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all din- 
ner-time, — and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught 
at last, as it flew by him. I'll not hurt thee, says my Uncle 
Toby, rising from his chair, and going across the room with the 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 75 

fly in his hand, — I'll not hurt a hair of thy head : — Go, — says 
he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke to let 
it escape ; — go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt 
thee ? — This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee 
and me. 

Before Sterne, there was in our literature no incident 
like this. To characterize the soft state of the feel- 
ings and the imagination that could originate it, 
Sterne himself was apparently the first to use the 
epithet sentimental ^ ; and by a curious coincidence he 
so employed it in the very year Eichardson published 
'Pamela.' Viewed largely, Eichardson is a senti- 
mentalist by virtue of the fact that he dwells upon 
the sin and shame of a world given over to the 
debauchee. Eousseau, when he sits down by Lake 
Geneva, and watches his tears as they drip into the 
water, is asking the spectator to sympathize with the 
wrongs — real or imaginary — which he has endured. 
Sterne never takes a lyrical view of life. He listens 
to the tale of human misery only because it gives him 
'sweet and pleasurable nerve vibrations.' In his 
sentiment is always involved the ludicrous. He 
moves into ripple our feelings by the starling which 
ought to be set free, by the fly, the hair of whose 
head ought not to be injured, and by the donkey 
which ought to be chewing a macaroon instead of an 
artichoke. When he seeks to awaken pleasure in a 
real distress, then he seems ignoble, until we reflect 
that author and work are an immense hoax. The 
absurdity lurking in special scenes of the ' Sentimental 
Journey ' is elusive ; but it is there. It is a kind of 
humor that evokes only the gentlest emotions of 

1 Dictionary of National Biography, liv., 201. 



76 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

pity, to be followed by the smile. It enfranchises 
the heart, purging it of melancholy, and giving zest 
to the mere bagatelles of existence. When Sterne's 
influence began to be felt throughout Europe, in 
translations and imitations — zigzag journeys here 
and there — it did more than all else to free literature 
from the depression of the serious sentimentalism of 
Eichardson, Eousseau, and their school.^ 

6. The Minor Novelists : Sarah Fielding, Samuel John- 
soyi, Oliver Goldsmith 

The first great period in the development of the 
English novel, which begins with ^Pamela' (1740), 
closes with the death of Sterne, or more precisely, with 
the publication of ^Humphry Clinker' (1771). The 
novels of this period which have become a recognized 
part of our literature, whether they deal in minute 
incident as in Eichardson and Sterne, or in farce, 
intrigue, and adventure as in Smollett and Fielding, 
have one characteristic in common: their subject is 
the heart. Moreover, underlying them, as their raison 
d^^tre, is an ethical motive. Eichardson makes the 
novel a medium for Biblical teaching as it is under- 
stood by a Protestant precisian; Eielding pins his 
faith on human nature ; Smollett cries for justice to 
the oppressed; Sterne spiritualizes sensation, address- 
ing ' Dear Sensibility ' as the Divinity whom he adores. 
Surrounding this group of novelists are several writers 
of similar aims, who, for the excellence of their work, 
or for other reasons, deserve special mention. 

1 Goethe: ' Spruche in Prosa,' No. 489 ; and Letter to Zelter, 
5 October, 1830. 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTUKY KEALISTS 77 

^ David Simple ' (1744), by Sarah Fielding, was occa- 
sioned by the success of ' Pamela/ It was approved 
by Richardson — Miss Fielding was one of his adopted 
daughters, — and it was justly commended and pre- 
pared for the press, with some ironical thrusts of his 
own, by her brother, Henry Fielding. In form it is a 
modification of the picaresque type. David, a self- 
conscious and vapid young man, takes lodgings in 
different parts of London, ostensibly in search of a 
true friend, whom he eventually finds in the fair and 
sweet Camilla. The story abounds in shrewd observa- 
tions on different phases of London life, in imperfectly 
welded character sketches, and in episodes, which, 
though often unconnected with the main plot, are 
allied to it in spirit. E-ichardson sang of chastity; 
Fielding sang of patience ; ' David Simple ' is an ex- 
altation of friendship. The episode of Dumont and 
Stainville is as noble and tender as the mediaeval 
story of Palamon and Arcite. Its place in English 
fiction is as a little companion piece to ^ Pamela ' and 
* Amelia.' 

^Easselas, Prince of Abyssinia' (1759), by Dr. 
Samuel Johnson, is a logical outcome of the novel of 
Eichardson. If a story may be written for the pur- 
pose of reducing Christian ethics to special maxims of 
conduct, it may likewise be written as a warning to 
those ^who listen with credulity to the whispers of 
fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of 
hope.' The ^Prince of Abyssinia' contains in little 
space Johnson's reflections at a moment when, sad- 
dened by the death of his mother and the poor returns 
from his literary work, he found life hardly worth 
living. In it Johnson compressed his ^ Eamblers ' 



78 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

and the ' Vanity of Human Wishes,' and in language 
which, though sometimes artificially antithetical, for 
the greater part runs on in sweet and plaintive mel- 
ody. The various conditions and ideals of life pass 
by him in review, and he pronounces an adverse judg- 
ment on them all. The prince and princess who 
escaped from the happy Abyssinian valley, hoping 
to find in the wide world some occupation worthy of 
hand or brain, return to the ennui of their youthful 
Eden, there to prepare for eternity. The novel of 
Eichardson has thus been turned to the purpose of 
an eloquent funeral sermon. 

'The Vicar of Wakefield' (1766) is, of all eigh- 
teenth-century novels, the one that many readers 
would the least willingly lose. Some years before 
Oliver Goldsmith wrote his charming narrative, the 
subject-matter available to the story-teller had become 
pretty well understood. There was the sentimental 
young lady, the villain, and the abduction ; that was, 
in the professional and commercial view, Eichardson's 
contribution to the novel. There was the intrigue, 
the adventure, the singular character, and the kind- 
hearted gentleman ; that was Fielding's contribution. 
There were English seamen and scenes at sea; that 
was Smollett's contribution. There must be some 
sermonizing, some ridicule of prevailing vices and 
affectations, or an attack upon those who make or 
administer the laws of the realm. The novelist 
might put his story into a series of letters, as did 
Frances Sheridan, mother of Eichard Brinsley ; or he 
might adopt the loose epic. The publisher had set- 
tled upon the size of the volume. That it should be 
a duodecimo was an item in the definition of the 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 79 

novel; one volume would do, two volumes were 
better, three or four volumes would be accepted. 

Goldsmith took his material from the common 
storehouse and transfused it with his own spirit. He 
works into his story a weighty essay on the penal 
code and prison discipline, anticipating public opinion 
by a full half -century ; he delivers an oration on 
liberty and patriotism, declaring that he would die 
for his king ; he preaches a sermon on hope for the 
wretched, pervaded with the spirit of the Sermon on 
the Mount. He has his sweet young women with 
romantic names, his graceful villain, his magnanimous 
country gentleman, and his eccentric country parson. 
He beautifies, softens, and tones down; the villain 
has some good in him and must finally be forgiven ; 
the abduction is a summer storm which passes, leav- 
ing no incurable suffering in its course. Less self- 
conscious than Pamela, less brilliant than Fielding's 
Sophia, Goldsmith's Olivia and Sophia — butterflies 
though they be, bedecking themselves with ' rufllings, 
and pinkings, and patchings' — are the nearest ap- 
proach to real country girls that had yet appeared in 
the novel. Less learned and less extraordinary than 
Parson Adams, Dr. Primrose, too, comes nearer to the 
real country vicar. He is subjected to little farce; 
his Quixotism is less artificial than that of Parson 
Adams ; he is touched by madness only on the ques- 
tion of second marriage among the clergy ; his notions 
of his duty are always clear, and he has the ability 
and the courage to act as he thinks. In thus taking 
off the harsh edges of eccentricity, instead of further 
roughening them, Goldsmith's method is the reverse 
of Sterne's. Sterne was lifting the novel into the 



80 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

hazy atmosphere of sentimental humor; Goldsmith 
was bringing it down to the village fireside. 

Goldsmith, however, was always a poet. In * The 
Vicar/ he is singing of the same ^ Dear lovely bowers 
of innocence and ease' which he was to sing of in 
* The Deserted Village.' He cannot for long keep his 
attention on things as they are. He falls into reverie, 
and sees all through a regretful longing. In spite 
of himself, he breaks out in the midst of his story 
into verse. Contrasted with Fielding, he has turned 
the novel into a prose poem, as Johnson had turned 
the novel of Eichardson into a sermon. Moreover, 
from another point of view, ^ The Vicar ' ought to be 
read in contrast to Lodge's ^Eosalind.' Here is the 
golden age once more, not however in Arcadia, but 
somewhere in England ; here is the imagination ideal- 
izing real, not conventional scenes. ^The Vicar of 
Wakefield' as a generative force has been felt 
throughout Europe. Recollections from it furnished a 
dramatic setting to the Frederike episode in Goethe's 
^ Dichtung und Wahrheit.' It is the literary parent 
of Auerbach's village tales, George Sand's ^Mare au 
Diable,' Bjornson's ^Synnove Solbakken,' a far-off 
Icelandic story, ' Lad and Lass ' (^ Piltur og Stulka '), 
by J6n Thoroddsen, and a legion of similar idyls in 
which reality shades off into poetry. 

As a humorist. Goldsmith set himself squarely 
against his contemporaries, and, with what little gall 
there was in him, expressly against Sterne. He 
never twitches at our nerves with the sentimental 
scene, but relieves his deepest pathos with a kindly 
irony. To him there is no humor in the dash, the 
asterisk, the wink, and the riddle ; his sentences 



THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REALISTS 81 

always have their logic and their rhythm. He de- 
spises ribaldry, and implies, with a grain of truth, 
that Sterne is only a second Tom D'Urfey, one of 
the most profane of Eestoration wits. The profes- 
sional humorists of his day had a conventional sen- 
tence which they put into their prefaces. Though 
slightly variable in form, this is its type : ^ ]S"othing 
is said or implied in the following pages that can 
shock the nicest ear, or kindle a blush on the face of 
innocence itself.' What others spoke in jest, he did in 
earnest. 

The finest thing about Goldsmith is his sane phi- 
losophy of life. Goldsmith had experienced the hard 
rubs of fortune as well as Johnson, but with different 
feelings. With robust resignation Johnson submitted 
to the inevitable, but only after bitterly complaining. 
Goldsmith cleared away despair, taking as the text of 
his story, Sperate, miseri, cavete, felices. By a different 
route he reached the same effects that Sterne was pro- 
ducing by his paganism. In adversity. Dr. Primrose 
hopes and works for a better turn of fortune, enduring 
in the meantime without fret. This is not the ques- 
tionable optimism of a Leibnitz ; it is that reasonable 
philosophy ' which,' says Goethe, in recording his debt 
to Goldsmith, ^in the end leads us back from all the 
mistaken paths of life.'^ 

1 Letter to Zelter, 25 December, 1829. 

G 



CHAPTEE III 

From 'Humphry Clinker^ to 'Waverley' 

1. The Imitators 

Excepting Jane Austen's, the novels published 
between ' Humphry Clinker ' (1771) and * Waverley ' 
(1814) were written mostly for the amusement or the 
instruction of the day, and, having served their pur- 
pose, they deservedly lie gathering dust in our large 
libraries. Undoubtedly a few of them, for their art, 
their humor, or their keen perception, will withstand, 
as they have done so far, the winnow of time ; others 
may live with the reading public as literary curiosities ; 
still others possess very great historical interest, and 
consequently have a life assured them among the 
students of our literature. In form, though not in 
content, all the fiction of this period is in immediate 
descent from our first school of novelists. Down to 
1790, the novel of letters and that of direct narration 
were in nearly equal vogue ; after that date the novel 
of letters lost ground. There were curious imitators 
of Eielding who divided their novels into books with 
introductory chapters, writing, they said, epics on 
which, like Fielding, they spent thousands of hours. 
Of all these imitations, by far the best is 'Henry' 
(1795), by Richard Cumberland the dramatist. In 
this novel Cumberland adjusted ' Tom Jones ' to the 

82 



FROM ' HUMPHRY CLINKER ' TO ' WAVERLEY ' 83 

manners of the end of the century, and in initial 
chapters he discoursed, with the rich observations of 
a long literary career, on the present and the past 
state of learning, remarking, by the way, that in his 
youth he frequented the home of his ' facetious ' 
master. 

The sentiment and gesture of Sterne were diffused 
everywhere ; the correspondence of lovers were ^ senti- 
mental repasts ' ; and letters of business were punctu- 
ated with the dash and the star. Most of Sterne's 
imitators, as Richard Griffith, author of ^ The Koran ' 
(1770), are inexpressibly dull. ^ The Man of Feeling ' 
(1771), by Henry Mackenzie, written in a style alter- 
nating between the whims of Sterne and a winning 
plaintiveness, enjoys the distinction of being the most 
sentimental of all English novels. One scene of it, 
in which the frail hero dies from the shock he receives 
when a Scotch maiden of pensive face and mild hazel 
eyes acknowledges that she can return his love for her, 
deserves to be remembered: ^He seized her hand — 
a languid color reddened his cheek — a smile bright- 
ened faintly in his eye. As he gazed- on her, it grew 
dim, it fixed, it closed — He sighed and fell back on 
the seat — Miss Walton screamed at the sight — His 
aunt and the servants rushed into the room — They 
found them lying motionless together. — His physician 
happened to call at that instant. Every art was tried 
to recover them — With Miss Walton they succeeded 
— But Harley was gone for ever.' 

Notwithstanding so much imitative work, the latter 
half of the eighteenth century was the seedtime of 
the nineteenth-century novel. The sentimental novel, 
expanding and gathering to itself politics and ethics, 



84 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

passed into the purely didactic novel, whose only- 
reason for being was as a medium for promulgating 
theories of government, conduct, and education. The 
novel of manners, mostly in the hands of women, was 
refined into a detailed and subtle novel of social satire ; 
of which the perfect type is ^ Pride and Prejudice.' 
As a reaction against the novel of manners, was de- 
veloped a new romance, which in its most popular 
form had its beginning with Smollett. This move- 
ment culminated in the romantic tales of Scott and 
Cooper. 

2. The Novel of Purpose 

Ever since the Reformation, the theories of moral- 
ists and philosophers had filtered into popular litera- 
ture, and in several notable instances had done service 
to fiction. ^ Utopia,' ^ Euphues,' ^ Oroonoko,' and all of 
Richardson's novels have their didactic aspects. In 
the years preceding the Erench Revolution, the specu- 
lations of Hooker, Hobbes, and Locke, on government, 
society, and education — developed, distorted, and 
emotionalized — were given over to the masses by 
men and women who wrote, not to convince, but to 
persuade and to arouse. This work began in France 
with the Encyclopaedists, Rousseau, Holbach, and 
others; it was completed by a group of philosophers 
known as perf ectibilians, among whom was Condorcet. 
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were the 
English perfectibilians, amateur philosophers, who, 
instead of looking backward, as Rousseau had done, 
for the earthly paradise, looked forward: the one to 
the golden age of anarchy; the other to the social 



FROM ' HUMPHRY CLINKER ' TO ' WAVERLEY ' 85 

emancipation of women. Minor writers, many of 
whom wrote treatises, pamphlets, and letters, on con- 
duct, education, and government, resorted to the novel 
for the purpose of popularizing current ideas. This 
didactic view of fiction upon which Eichardson had 
set the seal of his authority was encouraged in England 
by the success of Eousseau. In his ^ Nouvelle Heloise ' 
(1761) he represented by a concrete picture the state 
of nature, in which the elemental passions ruled 
supreme, and then he contrasted this state with the 
conventions of contemporary society. His intense 
emotionalism and the very great beauty of his descrip- 
tions of external nature held in a sort of solution 
his discourses on rank vs. merit, masculine vs. fem- 
inine perfection, real vs. apparent honor, etc. In 
^ ]^mile ' (1762) he tried to conceal an entrancing idyl 
in an educational programme. The didactic fictions 
which appeared during the half-century following 
^ £mile ' fall, in a general way, under the two classes, 
pedagogic and revolutionary. The inspiration of the 
former was a dissatisfaction with the prevailing method 
of education ; the inspiration of the latter was dissat- 
isfaction with the existing social order. Both classes 
had a common source of inspiration in a desire of 
reaching what is in accord with nature. 

The first of the English pedagogic romances was 
written by Henry Brooke, whose ^ Fool of Quality ' 
appeared in parts during the years 1766-70. It is 
a book that one can hardly speak of unreservedly 
without falling into antitheses which would seem 
untrue. Its main object was to describe in detail the 
education of a Christian gentleman. The hero visits 
all in poverty and distress, in prisons and in hospitals, 



86 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

relieving them out of exhaustless funds supplied by 
his uncle. One of its distinctive features is the stress 
laid upon physical training, the most absurd examples 
being cited of the hero's strength and agility. It 
would be impossible to imagine a novel more wretch- 
edly put together. On the other hand, it contains 
passages of magnificent rhetoric, incidents and tales 
of deep pathos, and inspiring ideals of Christian man- 
hood. 

An interesting variation in the pedagogic story is 
marked by Thomas Day's ^Sandford and Merton' 
(1783-89). Though it contains an elaborate scheme 
for parents to follow in the education of their chil- 
dren, it was equally a book to be read by the children 
themselves. By means of stories and Socratic con- 
versations, the young are taught to see the worth of 
astronomy, geography, zoology, botany, ethnology, 
political economy, and the cardinal virtues; and to 
appreciate duly the sweet temper of the negro and 
the savage grandeur of the American Indian. Some 
characteristics of a new woman appeared in ^ Sandf ord 
and Merton.' Rousseau's ideal, as depicted in Sophie 
educated expressly for J^mile, was thoroughly assimi- 
lated to the conditions of English life in the flamboy- 
ant ^ Sermons to Young Women ' (1765) by Dr. James 
Fordyce, a Presbyterian minister of London ; and she 
was made attractive in fiction by Frances Burney and 
Maria Edgeworth. Serious objections, however, were 
urged against her by the advanced women of the 
century. She was over passive, soft, and delicate; 
she dissembled too much; her airs were too enticing, 
and her foot made too pretty. The attributing to her 
of what were called peculiarly sexual virtues which 



FROM 'HUMPHRY CLINKER' TO 'WAVERLEY' 87 

differentiated her from man, was especially distasteful. 
Why a girl should not receive the same education as 
a boy was not quite clear. Thomas Day was among 
the first to protest against the delicacy of Rousseau's 
heroine. His young woman looks first to her health. 
^She rises at candle light in winter, plunges into a 
cold bath, rides a dozen miles upon a trotting horse or 
walks as many even with the hazard of being splashed 
or soiling her clothes.' She becomes acquainted with 
the best authors in the English language, and learns 
French to read it but not to speak it, that she may 
not be corrupted by barbers and dancing-masters. 
She is instructed in the established laws of nature, 
and to a small degree in geometry; and finally she is 
an expert in the duties of the household. Offshoots 
of this type of fiction were the purely juvenile stories 
of Maria Edgeworth, such as ^ Frank' and ^Eosa- 
mond,' which among children took the place of the 
fairy tales which Rousseau had so harshly condemned. 
Toward the close of the century there was general 
criticism among educationists of boarding schools, 
which did not adopt the new educational programme. 
It was argued that they rendered young women weak, 
vain, indolent, and sly ; and in place of them national- 
ized day schools were advocated, where boys and girls 
should receive the same training. Among novels 
written against boarding schools, the only one now 
remembered is Elizabeth Inchbald's *A Simple Story' 
(1791). Though marred by the author's anxiety to 
attribute to the influence of early education the grad- 
ual moral decay of her heroine, it contains the 
strongest situation that had yet appeared in the 
English novel — the conflict between religious preju- 



88 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

dice and love, such as we have on a grander scale in 
Charles Reade's ' Cloister and the Hearth.' 

The revolutionists were a group of London novelists 
whose work fell mostly in the last decade of the 
eighteenth century. The group consisted of Thomas 
Holcroft, William Godwin, Elizabeth Inchbald, and. 
Amelia Opie (who afterward broke away from the 
coterie and joined the Society of Friends). Charlotte 
Smith was of them in part ; and Robert Bage, a Tam- 
worth paper manufacturer, who had posed in literature 
as a second Sterne, taught in his later novels the 
same doctrines as the London set. Charlotte Smith 
may be regarded as speaking for her associates as 
well as for herself, when she says, ^ There is a chance 
that those who will read nothing if they do not read 
novels, may collect from them some few ideas, that 
are not either fallacious or absurd, to add to the very 
scanty stock which their insipidity of life has afforded 
them.' The ideas that were neither fallacious nor 
absurd were the ideas of the 'Social Contract,' the 
'System of Nature,' and the 'Rights of Man,' — Rous- 
seau, Holbach, and Paine. 

The most radical opinions of current philosophy 
were most boldly expressed, within the limits of the 
novel, by Holcroft in 'Anna St. Ives' (1792) : 'Every- 
thing in which governments interfere is spoiled.' 
'You and your footman are equal.' 'You maintain 
that what you possess is your own. I affirm that it 
is the property of him who wants it most.' ' Marriage 
is the concern of the individuals who consent to this 
mutual association, and they ought not to be prevented 
from beginning, suspending, or terminating it as they 
please.' ' Promises are nonentities ; they mean noth- 



FROM ' HUMPHRY CLINKER ' TO ' WAVERLEY ' 89 

ing, stand for notliing, and nothing can claim/ After 
these and similar perspicuous compliments to civiliza- 
tion, Holcroft drew, in the fifth of the six duodecimo 
volumes of which his novel is composed, an enthusi- 
astic picture of the perfect state toward which man- 
kind had been set moving. The people of the earth 
will form one great family living in brotherly love. 
All the absurd distinctions of rank will be abolished. 
Selfishness is to be no more as a motive to conduct, 
and universal benevolence will take its place. There 
will be no more personal property ; hence the detesta- 
ble word ^bargain' will become utterly unintelligible. 
It is true there may be some sort of agreement be- 
tween the sexes, but it will be nothing like the mod- 
ern marriage compact. Priests, princes, legislators, 
justices, and jailers will find their occupation gone. 
Man will win back the patriarch's length of life, and 
may gain the secret of immortality. Manual labor, 
in which all will engage, will be reduced to a mini- 
mum, and thus men will be able to ^expend their 
whole powers in tracing moral and physical cause 
and effect ; which, being infinite in their series, will 
afford employment of the most rational and delightful 
kind.' 

Not all the novelists of his school agreed with 
Holcroft on all points; and none of the rest pre- 
sented in the pages of one novel the whole revolu- 
tionary programme. Marriage and the relation of the 
sexes was the popular subject. Godwin in his ^ Politi- 
cal Justice ' asserted that ^ the institution of marriage 
is a system of fraud,' but in his novels he was more 
conservative. For example, much pains is taken in 
his ^ St. Leon ' (1799) to show that a man may possess 



90 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

special affection for wife and children without inter- 
fering with a benevolent and passionately just atti- 
tude toward his neighbors. In ^Barham Downs' 
(1788) Bage argues for the purity of a woman who 
has been betrayed by a young lord. Charlotte Smith's 
^ Desmond ' (1792) has as its interesting situation the 
generous and well-regulated passion of a young man for 
a married woman. The husband becomes dissipated, 
meddles with cold iron, and the widow, after twelve 
months' mourning, marries her platonic Werther. In 
Mrs. Opie's ^ Adeline Mowbray ' (1804) — the incidents 
of which are a rendering of certain passages in the 
career of Mary Wollstonecraf t — the heroine, who very 
early in life comes to the conclusion that the only 
marriage worthy of the name is one ^founded on ra- 
tional grounds and cemented by rational ties,' falls 
a victim to her theory. Mrs. Opie apologizes for her 
opinion that so long as men are inconstant and neglect 
their children, ^ marriage is a wise and ought to be a 
sacred institution.' 

Neither did Holcrof t's contemporaries see their way 
clear to bringing into the novel his prophetic vision of 
the philosopher's paradise in which men were to find 
the supreme pleasure in following up the thread of 
causal relations. They were content to point to some 
place and people on the earth that might poetically 
and approximately stand for their ideal of the per- 
fect state. In Bage's ^ Barham Downs ' the ideal was 
the pays de Vaud, and the rocks of Meillerie, where 
lived and died Julie Wolmar, ^the most virtuous of 
her sex.' In Godwin's ^Fleetwood' (1805) the life of 
simplicity and quiet voluptuousness was found in the 
valley of Urseren at the foot of St. Gotthard, which, 



FROM 'HUMPHRY CLINKER* TO 'WAVERLEY' 91 

as Scott observed, he covered with ^ a wood of tall 
and venerable trees.' In Bage's ' Hermsprong ' (1796) 
and Charlotte Smith's ' Old Manor House ' (1793), the 
earthly paradise was placed in the forests of North 
America among the aborigines, who, ^ possessing none 
of the tcedium vitoe of the Europeans, dance, play, and 
weary of this, bask in the sun and sing.' Of all ex- 
isting governments, it was agreed that the Federal 
Constitution of the United States was the best ; for, 
whatever might be its shortcomings, it was without 
question a social contract. 

The scheme on which the revolutionary novel was 
constructed was that which the propagandist with 
difficulty avoids — strong and exaggerated contrast, 
and development on parallel lines. A tyrant or vil- 
lain was selected from the upper class, who, hedged 
about by law and custom, wreaks a motiveless hatred 
on the sensitive and cultured hero, who, though born 
free, is not born to wealth and a title. The gentle- 
man after a career of crime may or may not come to 
a disgraceful end. That was optional. The hero, 
after years of drudgery and abject labor, after per- 
haps being compelled to play the violin or to write 
poetry to keep from starving, either is crushed, or by 
a revolution of fortune gains comparative ease. The 
best examples of this distinctively ^ victim-of-society ' 
story are Godwin's ^ Caleb Williams ' (1794) and Eliza- 
beth Inchbald's 'Nature and Art' (1796). Another 
procedure of the novelist was to place in the plot 
a young negro, or an English boy born and bred in 
the West Indies, and to let him comment on English 
customs in the light of nature. The child of nature 
can never be brought to comprehend the content of 



92 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

such, words as poverty and property ; and, however 
much scolded, insists upon calling compliments lies, 
and battles massacres. 

The leading characters necessary to work the mar 
chinery of this kind of novel have been suggested by 
the course of our narrative. The African whose ideali- 
zation began with Mrs. Aphra Behn became a ^ tawny 
boy,' gentle and faithful. The romanced Indian, the 
pattern of honor and courage, employed as a foil to 
the duplicity and the cowardice of the English aris- 
tocracy, was a new creation. There was always pres- 
ent the philosopher, who, disregarding the conventions 
of society, took as his guide, even in selecting a wife, 
the principles of justice and universal benevolence. 
He was an evolution, under the influence of the new 
philosophy, of Fielding's Mr. Square, who conducted 
himself according to Hhe unalterable rule of right 
and the eternal fitness of things.' How far removed 
the ethics of the revolutionist was from Fielding is 
seen by their attitude toward essentially the same 
gentleman. In ' Tom Jones ' he was a villain ; in 
Bage's ^ Hermsprong ' he was the hero. 

The revolutionists left behind them no great novel. 
The best they produced were * Caleb Williams' and 
^ St. Leon,' which Hazlitt, led astray by his sympathy 
with some of Godwin's opinions, pronounced ^ two of 
the most splendid and impressive works of the imagi- 
nation ' that had appeared in his time. As romances, 
Godwin's stories, with their secret trunks and in- 
human monsters, possess the same imaginative quali- 
ties as the contemporary Gothic romance, which we 
are presently to describe. ^ St. Leon ' has long been 
forgotten ; * Caleb Williams ' alone has survived. 



FROM ' HUMPHRY CLINKER ' TO ' WAVERLEY. 93 

Nevertheless the work of Godwin and his friends is 
historically important. They took the novel as it 
came to them — the sentimental romance, the story 
of adventure, the Gothic romance — and incorporated 
into it the social treatise. When they had done this 
in fictions that were for a period readable, they had 
created the didactic novel. What they were unable 
to do was to embody their ideas in high and enduring 
art. That was done for them by Shelley in the 
^ Eevolt of Islam ' and ' Prometheus Unbound.' 

3. The Light Transcript of Contemporary Manners 

It would be difficult to lay one's finger on any novel 
current near the close of the eighteenth century in 
which the author does not somewhere enlighten the 
reader as to what the story is intended to teach. In- 
struction, however, was not commonly put upper- 
most in the novels we are about to place in a group 
by themselves ; they were not written to overturn the 
English Constitution or to bring about a general ref- 
ormation of society, but ^ to mark the manners of the 
time.' There is ample evidence in the prefaces and 
critical digressions of these novels that Eichardson 
and Fielding were regarded as antiquated. It was 
not questioned that a Tom Jones existed in 1750, but 
he was not to be found in 1790. The English gentle- 
man of the higher type now resisted rather than 
yielded to temptation. Likewise the Lovelaces had 
become selfish and listless ^ danglers ' about places of 
amusement, too indolent to take in hand an abduction. 
Women, treated with cynical indifference, lost their 
passiveness, became 'rattles/ sometimes took the 



94 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

initiative in love-making, and expressed their surprise 
in exclamations no longer in good form. Farcical 
eccentricities were wearing down into lighter humors. 
Manners were not so coarse as in the previous genera- 
tion or two. ^ Pamela ' and ^ Clarissa/ which had 
once been eulogized from the pulpit, the novelists 
themselves now denounced as immoral. 

'Evelina' (1778) is the novel in which we move 
from the old to the new manners. Miss Frances 
Burney leads us into the assembly or London places 
of amusement, the opera, the playhouse, Vauxhall, 
Ranelagh, and the Pantheon, among the beings she 
no doubt had observed there : the Miss Branghtons, 
who give themselves out as being two years younger 
than they are ; their brother, who insists on establish- 
ing their true age ; Mr. Smith with his ' smart airs ' 
and ' quality looks,' who mistakes a figure of Neptune 
for a general ; the dissipated Lord Merton, who has 
announced that he is going to reform; Mr. Lovel, 
who stands half an hour before the glass on a morn- 
ing, meditating what he shall put on; and Lady 
Louisa, who, entering the drawing-room at Mrs. Beau- 
mont's assembly, ' flings herself upon a sofa, protest- 
ing, in a most affected voice, and speaking so softly 
she can hardly be heard, that she is fatigued to 
death.' 

The shadows of smart people who flit by us in 
'Evelina' assume fixed postures and more definite 
outlines in 'Cecilia' (1782). We are taken into the 
same haunts of fashion, and all is described in minute 
detail. Characters which in 'Evelina' were repre- 
sentative of mere humors are now moulded into types : 
the ' insensible' Mr. Meadows, who lounges and yawns 



FROM ' HUMPHRY CLINKER ' TO ' WAVERLE Y ' 95 

about the drawing-room, assuming a look of absence 
and a weariness of the music, the dance, the conversa- 
tion, and the faces he has seen a hundred times ; the 
^ supercilious ' Miss Leeson, who, when addressed by 
any one that does not belong to her peculiar coterie, 
stares, and replies, ^Indeed I know nothing of the 
matter ' ; the ^ voluble ' Miss Larolles, who dances five 
hours in a * monstrous crowd,' is ^monstrously fatigued,' 
and goes home with feet all blisters, ' excessively 
delighted.' 

^ Cecilia ' is the best caricature we have of English 
society just before the French Revolution. Before 
the appearance of Miss Burney, the novel of manners 
had been cultivated almost exclusively by men. The 
abcurdities of society had been viewed from the 
standpoint of the man of the world, the preacher, the 
recluse, and the rogue. Bichardson alone had gained 
the reputation of interpreting the feminine mind with 
any degree of success. The outlook is now completely 
reversed. The world is presented in fiction as it 
appears to a woman. Man falls from the pedestal he 
has erected for himself. Young ladies are the centres 
around which young men gyrate. The question ever 
kept before us concerning the character of a man is. 
Does he promise well as a husband ? Feminine dress 
is described in painstaking minutiae, and sensations 
are recorded which were never dreamed of by men. 
Moreover, the novel had been written not only by 
men, but for men. Frances Burney created for it a 
wholesome moral atmosphere. 

Miss Burney was an inspiring example to many 
other women, among whom was Maria Edgeworth. 
This agreeable writer gave the society novel its vogue 



96 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

in ^Belinda' (1801) and ^ Fashionable Tales ' (1809-12), 
comprising ^ Ennui/ ^The Dun/ ^Manoeuvring/ ^Al- 
meria/ ^The Absentee/ ^Vivian/ ^Madame de Fleury/ 
and ^Emilie de Coulanges.' Barring 'Ennui' and 
' The Absentee/ which have to do mostly with Ireland, 
these novels are an exposure of the extravagance, 
nonsense, and frivolity of fashionable London society, 
which, though not positively immoral, is thoroughly 
* rantipole.' Harum-scarum manners is the theme; the 
frolics of women who despise their dissipated and 
gambling husbands, flirt with their cousins and 
chance acquaintances, fight duels, and go about in 
masque or disguised as men. These fine ladies are 
reclaimed in the last chapters, or with the display 
of corded trunks piled up in the great hall they 
take a farewell of their husbands forever. Into 
this fashionable life Miss Edgeworth puts a young 
heiress, who, if she has been properly educated at 
home, receives no harm from her season in town, 
reconciles a husband and wife, and marries a man 
who knows his place. But if that early education 
has been faulty, she soon degenerates into a ^ dasher ' 
or 'title-hunter.' The Edgeworth morality was al- 
ways sane and healthy ; false sentiment and sophistry 
were always detected and exposed to the dry light of 
truth. Here is a mansion where there is no love nor 
esteem ; there is a cottage where all the pains of life 
are forgotten in its innocent pleasures. Look upon 
this picture and upon that, and then choose for your- 
self. Such was the Edgeworth plea for the simple 
affections against artificial manners. 

'Ennui' and 'The Absentee,' whose scenes are 
partly in England and partly in Ireland, are con- 



FROM ' HUMPHRY CLINKER ' TO ' WAVERLEY ' 97 

structed on the plan of tlie since popular international 
novel. For writing this kind of fction Miss Edge- 
worth was admirably equipped. She had passed her 
girlhood in England, and when at the age of sixteen 
she went to Ireland to live, she looked upon Irish 
manners with the wonder of a London boarding-school 
girl. After settling in Edgeworthtown, in the heart 
of Ireland, she attained in her view of England the 
Irish standpoint. In ^ Ennui,' along with dissertations 
on ^the causes, curses, and cures' of a prevailing 
malady, and on the best method of ameliorating the 
condition of the Irish peasantry, there were neces- 
sarily sketches of Irish life as it was. In ' The 
Absentee ' all special pleading is forgotten by author 
and reader in two brilliant groups of contemporary 
portraits. There are the London scenes in which Lady 
Clonbrony tries to purchase a foothold in society by 
the Oriental splendor of her ^ gala,' and by the present 
of dried Irish salmon to Lady St. James, and struggles 
pathetically to rid herself of her Hibernian accent 
by adopting pure cockney. Then there are the mov° 
ing scenes on the abandoned Irish estate, where the 
tenants are living in rags and mud, racked by the 
heartless agent. In this effective contrast of manners. 
Miss Edgeworth is historically midway between Smol- 
lett and Henry James. 

The popularizer of the society novel, the creator of 
the international novel. Miss Edgeworth, as the author 
of ^Castle Eackrent' (1800), has other and greater 
claims to attention. The Irishman as he appeared 
in London had been for a long time an incidental 
character in fiction. ^ Castle Eackrent ' is a story of 
the Irishman in his castle. It was written by one 



98 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

who saw all the absurdities of the Irishman's char- 
acter, relished the picturesque exaggeration of his 
speech, and felt pity for his distress. From it flowed 
all those Irish stories which for the next fifty years 
flooded England. Moreover, it was the most special- 
ized portrait of manners that fiction had produced. 
The English novel at this time, though in individual 
instances it had shown a disposition to do so, had not 
freed itself from traditional characters. Sir Charles 
Grandisons, for example, were as thick as the mock 
kings in mediaeval battles. 'Castle Rackrent' was a 
revelation of what could be done by direct and care- 
ful observation. Its characters were all new. Nobody 
had ever heard of Sir Patrick, the inventor of rasp- 
berry whiskey, who ' had his house, from one year's 
end to another, as full of company as ever it could 
hold and fuller ' ; of the litigious Sir Murtagh, who, 
' out of forty-nine suits which he had, never lost one 
but seventeen ' ; of Sir Kit, who, though ' he hit the 
toothpick out of his adversary's finger and thumb,' 
was himself mortally wounded ; of Sir Condy, the last 
of the Rackrents, who, with a breathless gulp, quaffed 
off the huge ancestral horn filled to the brim, and, 
turning black in the face, 'dropped like one shot.' 
No philosophy of humor was expounded, but there 
was humor ranging from farce to subtle suggestion, 
and it came without apparent premeditation. 

4. Tlie Gothic Romance 

Just as the novel of sentiment and humor, when 
social and educational theories were brought to bear 
upon it, passed through a series of changes, resulting 



FROM 'HUMPHRY CLINKER' TO 'WAVERLEY' 99 

in the delineation of national characteristics, so the 
same novel, under other influences, was turned into 
romance. The two movements were exactly con- 
temporaneous. It was shown that the novel of 
Richardson and Fielding has writ upon it certain 
characteristics of mediaeval and early modern fiction. 
A common incident of the old romancers, both English 
and Continental, was a young woman rescued from a 
miscreant or a satyr by a brave and courteous knight. 
Kichardson relieved the incident of its feudal or pas- 
toral setting, of its enchantment and witchcraft, and 
made it the backbone of all his novels. The miscreant 
or the satyr became a Lovelace ; the knight, a Grandi- 
son; and the princess, a Miss Byron. Likewise 
Fielding shore the picaresque novel of its farcical vil- 
lany; and at length the Spanish rogue was trans- 
formed into Tom Jones, a typical English gentleman. 
To be real, to be sane, to restrain the imagination, was 
equally the aim of Richardson and Fielding, who were 
in perfect accord with Augustan canons of criticism. 
But in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, 
there were signs of dissatisfaction with the poetry 
and criticism of Pope; and this marks the faint 
beginnings of the so-called romantic movement, 
which eventually revolutionized literature. For the 
form of the novel, this literary revolution meant that 
the epistolary and dramatic analogies employed by 
Richardson and Fielding were to be displaced by the 
epic narrative ; for the content of the novel, it meant 
the abandonment of analysis and ridicule, and a return 
to magic, mystery, and chivalry. 

These changes were initiated by Smollett. With 
the exception of ^Humphry Clinker,^ his novels are 



100 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

all loose epics. Realism he carried to that point 
where by its enormities it becomes romance. And 
certain passages in 'Count Fathom' show a revived 
interest in superstition as unmistakably as does 
the poetry of Collins and Gray. Renaldo, who 
has been informed that his Monimia is dead and 
buried, visits her reputed tomb in a church lying 
in a sequestered field. It is a night of 'uncommon 
darkness.' As he enters and walks up 'the dreary 
aisle/ the clock strikes twelve and the owl screeches 
from the ruined battlements. He turns his ' blood- 
shot eyes' to his attendants, beckons them to with- 
draw, and falls prostrate on the cold grave, where he 
remains in the gloom till morning. He repeats his 
midnight pilgrimage, and becomes entranced. He is 
startled by solemn notes from the organ touched by 
' an invisible hand,' and the sudden and simultaneous 
illumination of nave, transept, and choir. Looking 
into vacancy, he sees the 'figure of a woman arrayed 
in white,' who, approaching with easy step, cries Ee- 
naldo ! in a voice very like Monimia's. He is speech- 
less with terror ; ' his hair stands upright,' and ' a cold 
vapor thrills through every nerve.' That phantom is 
really Monimia, who has feigned death to get clear of 
the villain of the story and to contrive an interview 
with her lover. Here is a note that our literature 
lost with the last of the Elizabethans. Superstition, 
it is true, was not absent from the Queen Anne writ- 
ers. But there is a marked contrast between their 
treatment of it and Smollett's. Defoe, Addison, and 
Pope described coldly and minutely the devil, the 
ghost, and the sylph, as if they were tangible reali- 
ties; Smollett awakened wonder at a mystery, which, 



FROM 'HUMPHRY CLINKER' TO 'WAVERLEY' 101 

however, he finally accounted for. The trick of first 
exciting fear and then letting it suddenly tumble flat 
became the usual procedure of Gothic romance for the 
next half-century. 

The publication of ' Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, 
an Historical Eomance ' (1762), attributed to the Rev. 
Thomas Leland of Dublin, must have delighted the 
romanticists. Not since the death of Defoe had there 
appeared in English (so far as I know) an original 
historical novel. There is, furthermore, no similarity 
between the ' Memoirs of a Cavalier ' and ' Longsword.' 
The former is a story of adventure with the Civil 
Wars as a background, related with the detail of an 
authentic historical document. The latter is a repro- 
duction of feudal scenes such as we have in Shake- 
speare's historical plays ; and the object of its author 
was not to impose upon the credulity of the reader, 
but to entertain him with a splendida fahula. Nearly 
all the elements of Scott's historical romances lie 
in ^ Longsword ' : the tournament, the bravery and 
courtesy of knighthood, baronial crimes and jealousies, 
and the romantic thread of virtuous and constant 
love. Unfortunately the romance lacks historical 
perspective ; consequently its great scenes — as the 
Earl denouncing Hubert de Burgh in the presence of 
King Henry the Third — lose the force due to their 
conception. 

A new impetus was given to romance by Horace 
Walpole, who built near Twickenham a whimsical 
Gothic structure, known as Strawberry Hill. His 
^Castle of Otranto' was published in 1764. The 
events of the romance, though they are assigned 
to Italy and to the twelfth or the thirteenth century, 



102 DEVELOPMENT OP* THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

have no definite historical background ; all is built up 
in the imagination. A castle with a black tower, long 
dark stairways, airy chambers where doors slam and 
screech on rusty hinges, trap doors, subterranean 
caverns leading to a great church — this is the scene 
of the mediaeval tragedy. Within the castle Walpole 
places the tyrant Manfred, a patient and long-suffer- 
ing wife, domestics, two romantic girls of exceeding 
beauty, and ^a lovely young prince, with large black 
eyes, a smooth white forehead, and manly curling 
locks like jet.' A great, gloomy, upper chamber is 
haunted by a giant in armor, who in shaking himself 
stupefies the domestics with terror. The troubled 
portrait of Manfred's grandfather ^ utters a deep sigh, 
heaves its breast, quits its pannel, descends on the 
floor with a grave and melancholy air,' and beckons 
his wretched grandson to follow. The romance is the 
embodiment of a dilettant's nightmare, as he sleeps 
and writes by chimney pieces modelled from the tombs 
of Westminster and Canterbury. Smollett, it was 
said, gave to the romance its method of dealing with 
the superstitious. Walpole gave it its machinery, 
its characters, its castle, and its Gothic name. 

Walpole implied in his preface to the second edition 
of the ^Castle of Otranto' that he had aimed to find 
a middle way between the extravagance of mediaeval 
romance and the matter-of-fact novel. Miss Clara 
Keeve thought he had not accomplished his purpose ; 
and she accordingly set out to correct him by writing 
the ^Champion of Virtue' (1777), afterward called 
the ^Old English Baron.' The result was a clever 
story, in which contemporary life and manners were 
placed in a mediaeval setting. Two things are per- 



FROM ' HUMPHRY CLINKER ' TO ' WAVERLEY ' 103 

haps to be principally noted in this romance. It con- 
tains both Gothic and historical incidents, as if Miss 
Reeve were blending ' Longsword ' and the ' Castle 
of Otranto' into one romance; and the scene of the 
supernatural visitations becomes what it was almost 
invariably to be in succeeding Gothic writers, not the 
entire castle, but a wing of it. 

Still another direction was given to romantic fiction 
by William Beckford, who, having grander whims 
than Walpole and the wherewithal to gratify them, 
built an immense mansion in Wiltshire, called Font- 
hill Abbey, in whose mysterious halls, galleries, and 
tower, he endeavored to realize his dreams of 
Oriental luxury and magnificence. 'Vathek, an Ara- 
bian Tale,' written in French, and published at 
Lausanne and Paris in 1787, was translated from the 
French manuscript by Samuel Henly, an English 
scholar and schoolmaster, and published, without 
Beckford's consent, in London in 1786. A fresh 
interest had been excited in the marvels and super- 
stitions of the East by Antoine Galland's French 
translation of the ^Arabian Nights' (1704-17). An- 
thony Hamilton and Voltaire had adapted these 
fictions to a light and facetious satire on contempo- 
rary French society. In his sarcasm, Beckford car- 
ried on this humorous treatment of Eastern fable. 
The kicking of ' the stranger ' through the apartments, 
down the steps, through the courts of the Caliph's 
palace, and then through the streets of Samarah, is a 
piece of extravagance as delightful as anything in the 
romances of Voltaire. In his love of grotesque horror, 
Beckford is brought into line with Walpole. His 
Caliph, in league with the Intelligences of Darkness, 



104 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

commits to admiration every form of crime simply be- 
cause he has nothing else to do. His bloated Giaour, 
^with ebony forehead and huge red eyes,' drinks 
the aristocratic blood of fifty beautiful youths, and 
still his thirst is not slaked. The tale closes with a 
cleverly devised punishment for the damned. In the 
magnificent Hall of Eblis, strewn with gold dust and 
saffron, amid censers burning ambergris and aloes, 
they walk a weary round for eternity; their faces 
corrugated with agony, and their hands pressing 
upon hearts enveloped in flames. 

Thus we see the new romance was of three varieties 
shading into one another : the historical, the Gothic, 
and the Oriental. If in 1786 it was uncertain which 
of them would become the most sought-for novel of 
the circulating library, the question was soon settled 
by the success of Mrs. Ann Eadcliffe, who, in the 
redundancy of her style, her passion for music and 
wild scenery, and her ability to awaken wonder and 
awe, is the most complete expression of romanticism 
in English fiction before Scott. During the years 
1789-97 she published five romances, in the following 
order : ^ The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne,' ^ A 
Sicilian Eomance,' ' The Eomance of the Forest,' ' The 
Mysteries of Udolpho,' ^The Italian.' The order of 
their publication indicates their relative literary 
merit. 

These romances always have their castle, usually in 
ruins, which is located in the Highlands of Scotland, 
in southern France, in Italy, or in Sicily. In the 
haunted wing of the castle, Mrs. Eadcliffe shuts up 
o'nights her heroine, who passes her time in various 
occupations. If the night is clear, Emily throws open 



FROM ' HUMPHRY CLINKER ' TO ' WA VERLEY ' 105 

the casement, and lets the moonlight stream into her 
room ; and as she sits and thinks of her distant lover 
from whom she is cruelly separated, she hears from 
a distance the soft tones of a lute ; she goes to bed, 
sleeping soundly and dreaming of the quiet scenes of 
her early home. If there is outside thunder, light- 
ning, and rain, she reconnoitres her room, and finds 
in an old chest a dusty manuscript. She sits down 
by a table and begins reading ; as the ink is paled by 
age, she has much difficulty in making out the words ; 
but she learns enough to be aware or to suspect that 
a horrible crime was once committed in this very 
chamber. At this moment her candle burns blue and 
goes out ; she is left in darkness, and she screams. 
On another night, if it is very dark, if winds rock the 
battlements, and, blowing through casement and crev- 
ice, shake the tapestries, she discovers a door leading 
to her room, before strangely unnoticed ; in fright and 
dishevelled hair she tugs at it, but it will not open, for 
it is bolted on the outside. Exhausted, she goes to 
bed, and a little after midnight she hears the bolt 
gently pushed back and the door gently opened. The 
moon is now out, and the shadow of a man moves 
along the wall, who, with uplifted dagger, approaches 
the bed of his victim, feigning to be asleep. As he 
looks upon the sweet and beautiful face before him, 
his corrugated features relax, and he retires in haste. 
In 'The Italian,' Mrs. Kadcliffe drew upon less 
artificial sources of fear ; the crimes of banditti and 
monks and the rack of the Inquisition — a word 
which she was able to invest with the dread of the 
mediaeval Demogorgon. In scenes descriptive of the 
pomp and devotion of the Eoman Church, such as 



106 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

the novice taking the veil, and the nun dying before 
the high altar, her only equal is Chateaubriand. 

Mrs. Eadcliffe wrote for the story, and not for the 
characters, which are all types, and soon became con- 
ventional. There is always the young lover, a gentle- 
man of high birth, usually in some sort of disguise, 
who, without seeing the face of the heroine, may fall 
in love with her ' distinguished air of delicacy and 
grace ' or ^ the sweetness and fine expression of her 
voice. ^ The only variation in the heroine is that she 
may be either dark or fair. The beautiful creature 
is confined in a castle or a convent because she refuses 
to marry some one whom she hates. She finally has 
her own way and marries her lover. The tyrant is 
always the same man under different names ; add to 
him a little softness, and he becomes the Byronic hero. 

Mrs. Eadcliffe was praised in her own time for her 
ability to describe places she had never visited. She 
had seen mountains, castles, and abbeys, but not those 
of southern Europe. Her descriptive epithets were 
accordingly general, suitable to the type, and not to 
the individual. ^ Terrific ' or dreamy scenes assumed 
clear outlines in her imagination, and she was able to 
transfer the image of them to the reader. She saw 
into the art of description far enough to maintain 
without incongruity a point of view. Perhaps she 
was at her best in noting the changing aspects of 
forest, castle, and sea, at the approach of evening 
twilight. 

There followed Mrs. Eadcliffe a large number of 
Gothic writers, most of whom were young men and 
f oung women. Matthew Gregory Lewis, a talented 
gentleman of the Werther-Jerusalem type, published 



FROM 'HUMPHRY CLINKER' TO 'WAVERLEY' 107 

' The Monk ' in. 1795, and was ever afterward known as 
' Monk ' Lewis. He employed magic and necromancy 
as the machinery of meretricious scenes, which were 
intended to be humorous ; he descended into the vaults 
of the dead, where nuns were buried alive, and he 
described in detail all that he saw there. William 
Godwin's ^ Caleb Williams' (1794) and 'St. Leon' 
(1799) are Gothic tales, as well as didactic novels. 
The former is the first detective story, and the latter 
is a revelation of E-osicrucian mysteries. Charles 
Brockden Brown, the father of American fiction, was 
also of the Radcliffe school. The hero of his first 
romance, 'Wieland, or the Transformed' (1798), 
haunted by voices he does not understand (which are 
finally explained as coming from a ventriloquist), 
runs mad, and murders his wife and children. 'Edgar 
Huntley ' (1799-1801) is a detective story, and a much 
better one than ' Caleb Williams.' A man having no 
enemies is shot dead under an elm, on a 'dark and 
tempestuous night.' How shall the murder be ac- 
counted for ? A clew is discovered which leads to a 
laborer, who committed the deed while walking in his 
sleep. The freshest parts of this romance are those 
descriptive of life on the frontier, the caverns of the 
Alleghanies, Indian massacres, and a contest with a 
panther. 'Arthur Mervyn' .(1799-1800) is likewise 
a romance of crime, having for its Gothic incident 
a case of suspended animation, and as a realistic back- 
ground the ravages of yellow fever in Philadelphia in 
1793. The poet Shelley wrote two romances, 'Zas- 
trozzi ' (1810) and ' St. Irvyne, or the Kosicrucian ' 
(1811), which are a sort of union of Radcliffe and 
Godwin. His heroine plunges the dagger into her 



108 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

heart, and falls ^ weltering in purple gore ' ; his hero, 
enveloped in a flash of lightning, expires 'blackened 
in terrible convulsions.' Mrs. Mary Shelley's ' Frank- 
enstein' (1818) is at once the best written and the 
most ghastly production of Gothic art. The sixteenth- 
century romancers, for example Spenser, created the 
semblance of human beings by necromancy; Mrs. 
Shelley created a monster on pseudo-scientific prin- 
ciples. 

The Gothic romance was a reversion to material 
which the realists had cast aside. But it is to mis- 
conceive the course of literary evolution to suppose 
that the restoration of an old fashion or an old 
form is ever complete. Just as Richardson and 
Fielding show unmistakably whence they came, so 
the Gothic romance continued to the end to bear 
marks of the realistic novel whence it immediately 
proceeded. Mrs. Eadcliffe conveyed the tyrant, the 
disobedient child, and the detested lover from Har- 
lowe Place to a castle, and in lingering over monastic 
crimes, she was on a morbid search for new sensations 
as much as was Sterne in the ' Sentimental Journey.' 
E-ichardson strove to awaken pity for innocence in 
distress. The romancer was his complement; with 
pity he would unite terror. Though he could make 
the hair stand on end for several hundred pages, the 
result was not true tragedy ; for there were no ^Dsycho- 
logical reasons for his ghosts and sleep-walkings ; and 
his takings-off were so motiveless and bloody as to 
be humorous. The Gothic romance was not, as its 
authors supposed, a reproduction of * Hamlet' and 
' Macbeth,' but rather of the melodrama from which 
Shakespearean tragedy arose, and into which it de- 



FROM ' HUMPHRY CLINKER ' TO ' WAVERLEY ' 109 

generated. Moreover, it never attained, in its trans- 
formations and revelations, to the beauty of Spenser's 
magic, whicli it endeavored to imitate. 

And yet the Gothic romancer helped to make 
the English novel what it is to-day. He rightly in- 
sisted that literature is not merely utilitarian; that 
there is outside the real world, to use a phrase of 
Bishop Hurd's, ^a world of fine fabling.' In his 
attention to his plot he lost sight of his characters, 
which reverted to types and abstractions ; but he was 
making possible a ' Jane Eyre ' in which high romance 
should lend its aid to the sternest realism. Though 
he never went very far into medisevalism, he pointed 
out the path to Scott; Strawberry Hill, Eonthill 
Abbey, and Abbotsford are successive manifesta- 
tions of the same spirit. The lineal descendants of 
the Gothic romance are the tales of terror and wonder 
by Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne. The romance of 
crime such as was written by Bulwer and Dickens 
is a realistic treatment of Gothic melodrama. Godwin 
and Charles Brockden Brown were the first to explore 
the mazes of the detective story; and the latter 
began the transformation of the Badcliffe romance 
into the Indian tales of Cooper. Mrs. Eadcliffe, 
possessing a real passion for deep woods, mountains, 
storm, and sea, — those aspects of nature which 
impressed Byron, — was able to add a new interest 
to fiction. Her influence, either directly or through 
Scott, has been felt on every variety of the nine- 
teenth-century novel, whether romantic, psychological, 
or naturalistic. She made the landscape one of the 
conventions of fiction. 



110 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

5. Tlie Historical Romance 

As has been indicated already, the Gothic revival 
was a revival of interest not only in ghosts but also in 
history. The historical romance of the kind written 
by Barclay and Calprenede became nearly extinct 
in the eighteenth century. Occasionally something 
like it appeared in England ; such, for example, are 
the secret histories of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood. 
Between them and ^ Longsword ' (1762), a faint inter- 
est in history was probably kept up in England by 
the Abbe Prevost's historical tales. They would natu- 
rally appeal to an Englishman, for their scenes were 
familiar to him. His ' Doyen de Killerine,' published 
in 1735 and translated into English in 1752, has as 
an historical background Ireland in the time of James 
the Second ; and the hero of his ^ Histoire de M. Cleve- 
land ' (1732-39) is a natural son of Oliver Cromwell 
Our romancers must have known of Prevost's work, 
and as late as 1789 there is an allusion by a reviewer 
to Calprenede's ^ Cleopatre ' and ^ Cassandre,' which we 
may infer from another allusion by Scott were in well- 
appointed circulating libraries. The line of connec- 
tion is from internal evidence undeniable; along it 
were passed ^ dignity of sentiment,' ^ elegance of dic- 
tion,' the hero of uncertain parentage, and the critical 
position that romance may recombine historical facts, 
add to them, and make whom it please contempora- 
ries. Still, though there is this line of descent, 
too much may be easily made of it, for the old his- 
tory lost itself in the libel. Our romancers, coming 
in the wake of a new enthusiasm for Shakespeare, 
had in mind his historical plays, from which they 



FROM ♦ HUMPHRY CLINKER ' TO ' WAVERLEY ' 111 

derived fresh material and suggestion. They modified 
significantly the seventeenth-century historical for- 
mula, for they rarely employed the historical allegory. 

* Longsword ' with its spirited chivalry stands in 
isolation. Nothing very like it appeared during the 
following twenty years. But its influence was at 
once apparent in Gothic romance, where it led to his- 
torical details as a background to the castle and the 
ghost in armor. The year when the new historical 
novel began to have the air of a distinct species is 
1783, when Miss Sophia Lee published the first vol- 
ume of the ^ Recess,' to be followed in 1786 by two 
more volumes. It is a tale of the time of Queen 
Elizabeth, into which are brought most of the court 
worthies. Its heroine, who is a daughter of Mary 
Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk, is of course 
as preposterous a creation as Prevost's son to Crom- 
well. The part of most sustained interest is that 
which unfolds the character of the Earl of Leicester, 
who is banished and recalled by his queen, intrigues 
with Lady Essex, and removes his wife by contriving 
that she eat by mistake a dish of poisoned carp, which 
she has expressly prepared for him. 

From the ^ Kecess ' there is a steady flow of his- 
torical romances down to Scott. Most of them, deriv- 
ing their facts from the Elizabethan historical drama, 
have to do with the contentions between the houses 
of York and Lancaster. But they are not confined 
to this period ; they spread out over English history 
back to William of Normandy and forward to the 
execution of Charles the Eirst. Their authors had 
no very fixed method of procedure. The ' Eecess ' is 
essentially a sentimental novel, in which historical 



112 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

characters weep, sigh, and swoon; and it is one of 
many similar pathetic tales. Other romances are 
Smollett adventures, in which the actors are well- 
known gentlemen in history. A good example of 
this type is ^The Adventures of John of Gaunt ' (1790), 
by James White. John of Gaunt, the Duke of 
Gloucester, and the Black Prince visit Chaucer at 
Woodstock. On the way there, they meet Owen 
Glendower, who joins them. Chaucer entertains them 
at breakfast, reads to them from his unpublished 
* House of Fame,' and receives calmly the Black 
Prince's observation that ' in some parts of the divert- 
ing and instructive poem, the lines are incorrect as 
to metre.' They all together set out for ^ a gorgeous 
tournament to be solemnized at the royal castle of 
Carnarvon,' and on the way are allured to a den of 
robbers by wine, confections, and songs of beautiful 
damsels. They escape and reach Wales. Of the same 
kind are two more fictions by White : ' Earl Strong- 
bow ' (1789), and ' The Adventures of Richard Coeur 
de Lion' (1791). Other romancers paid more atten- 
tion to the facts of history. Clara Reeve in her 
^ Roger de Clarendon' (1793) gave at the end of her 
preface a list of the authors she had consulted, among 
whom are Froissart, Holinshed, and Smollett. She 
sketched the characters of the great men of the sec- 
ond Richard's reign, taking as her model Plutarch ; 
and her purpose was to show the young that the men 
who had helped to make England what it is, were not 
as represented by the revolutionary novelists. 

The romances of Jane Porter were a great improve- 
ment over any imaginative treatment of history that 
had yet appeared. The first of the four volumes of 



FROM ' HUMPHRY CLINKER ' TO ' WAVERLEY ' 113 

^ Thaddeus of Warsaw ' (1803) is almost wholly histori- 
cal, having as subject those heartrending events that 
gather around the partition of Poland in 1793, and 
as hero Kosciusko under another name. The Polish 
battle scenes are introductory to a picture of the 
Polish refugees roaming about in London, in poverty 
and distress. The romance is spoiled in its last vol- 
umes by Wertherized domestic scenes ; and its plot is 
amateurish and impossible. For writing 'The Scot- 
tish Chiefs ' (1809) Jane Porter was better equipped. 
She had lived in Edinburgh, was familiar with the 
Wallace and Bruce traditions, supplemented her 
knowledge by reading the fine old Scotch poem, the 
' Bruce,' by John Barbour ; and — what no other ro- 
mancer had ever thought of doing — she visited the 
places she had planned to describe. She had assimi- 
lated, too, the spirit of chivalry in the 'Arcadia' 
and the 'Faery Queen.' There is no melodrama 
in romantic fiction that holds the attention more 
closely than the capture of Dumbarton Castle, or the 
scene in the council hall at Stirling, when Wallace 
pushes his way through the angry and treacherous 
chiefs. 

A very curious experiment in historical fiction was 
made by the antiquarian Joseph Strutt in 'Queenhoo- 
Hall.' Left incomplete by its author, it was hastily 
completed by Sir Walter Scott, and published in 1808. 
Of it, Strutt wrote in his preface : ' The chief purpose 
of the work is to make it the medium of conveying 
much useful instruction, imperceptibly, to the minds 
of such readers as are disgusted at the dryness usually 
concomitant with the labours of the antiquary, and 
present to them a lively and pleasing representation 



114 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

of the manners and amusements of our forefathers, 
under the form most likely to attract their notice. 
The scene of the piece is laid in England, and the 
time (in which the events are supposed to take place) 
is in the reign of Henry the Sixth.' In describing 
May games, tavern scenes, and mediaeval ^ spectacles/ 
Strutt brought to bear on his work what was then 
regarded as profound antiquarian and linguistic knowl- 
edge — with never a gleam of imagination. The im- 
portance of such a publication in 1808, is that it 
stated a definite programme for the historical novelist 
— an exact reproduction of the past. Jane Porter 
sent to school to Joseph Strutt would have been a 
rival to Sir Walter Scott. 

6. Jane Austen — the Critic of Romance and of 
Manners 

The last half of the eighteenth century was an era 
of immense expansion. Men found their hearts and 
sobbed like children ; they formed for themselves new 
ideals of conduct, and vast and visionary schemes for 
their social amelioration. Their sympathies were 
enlarged ; they described the impressions that the 
sights and sounds of nature made upon them in words 
trembling with enthusiasm and passion ; their imagi- 
nations enfranchised, they were carried away from 
the world around them into a romantic past or into a 
romantic future. The novel, which from Eichardson 
downward had been a faithful record of this dilation 
of heart and imagination, became in the closing years 
of the eighteenth century the literature of crime, 
insanity, and the nightmare. Eomanticism had drunk 



FROM ' HUMPHRY CLINKER ' TO ' WAVERLEY ' 115 

immoderately of new emotions, and needed sharp cas- 
tigation from good sense. 

Jane Austen was the daughter of a humble clergy- 
man living at Steventon, a little village among the 
chalk hills of South England. There and in neighbor- 
ing places she passed her life. Her novels were pub- 
lished during the years 1811-18, in the following 
order : ' Sense and Sensibility,' ' Pride and Prejudice,' 
* Mansfield Park,' ' Emma,' ' Northanger Abbey,' and 
'Persuasion.' The last two appeared together and 
posthumously. Dates of publication are misleading 
as to the composition of three of them. * Pride and 
Prejudice ' was written in 1796-97 ; ' Sense and Sensi- 
bility' in 1797-98; and 'Northanger Abbey' in 1798. 
Furthermore, there is a discrepancy between the dates 
of actual composition and conception. 'Sense and 
Sensibility ' is the completion of an early sketch ante- 
dating 'Pride and Prejudice'; 'ISTorthanger Abbey' 
is a return to the spirit of burlesque tales written and 
destroyed before ' Sense and Sensibility ' was begun. 
While the philosophers were teaching that a man 
should enlighten his generation without pay, and in 
the meantime were publishing expensive editions 
of their novels, Jane Austen quietly went on with 
her work, making no great effort to get a publisher, 
and, when a publisher was got, contenting herself 
with meagre remuneration and never permitting her 
name to appear on a title-page. She is one of the 
sincerest examples in our literature of art for art's 
sake. 

' Northanger Abbey ' is primarily a comic version 
of the Gothic romance, and is thus to be classed with 
the great burlesques, ' Don Quixote ' and ' Joseph 



116 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Andrews/ The heroine, Catherine Morland, has noth- 
ing heroic about her. At ten, she ^had a thin, awk- 
ward figure, a sallow skin without color, dark, lank 
hair, and strong features.' ' She never could learn or 
understand anything before she was taught, and some- 
times not even then.' At fifteen, as is nature's way, 
appearances mended, and she grew quite a good- 
looking girl. When her imagination had become 
sufiiciently excited by the * dreadful situations and 
horrid scenes ' of romance, she received an invitation 
to pass some time at ISTorthanger Abbey in Gloucester- 
shire. The Abbey was very disappointing, for it was 
a luxurious and thoroughly modernized gentleman's 
house, containing no gloomy chambers and no sub- 
terranean passage leading to a chapel two miles away. 
The first night at the Abbey, however, was stormy; 
there were high winds and pelting rain, and distant 
doors slammed. Left alone in a cheerful and com- 
fortable room, Catherine went through all the pleasing 
frights of the ^ Mysteries of Udolpho.' 

In ^ Sense and Sensibility,' Jane Austen, in more 
subdued irony, ridiculed the sentimentalists. She 
took as the leading characters in her story two sisters 
who stand respectively for sense and sensibility: 
Elinor suppresses her feelings and acts sanely ; Mari- 
anne rejoices in misery, seeks it, renews it, and 
creates it. Marianne's favorite maxim is that a 
second attachment is a crime. After being jilted by 
a villain, who carries off with him, instead of her 
dear self, a lock of her hair, and after some dangerous 
experiments in hysterics, which end in fever, she is 
cured of her sentimentalism, and marries a man 
twenty years her senior, who has likewise suffered 



FROM ' HUMPHRY CLINKER ' TO * WAVERLEY ' 117 

from a former passion, and wears a flannel waistcoat 
as a protection against the English climate. 

In * Northanger Abbey ' and * Sense and Sensibility/ 
Jane Austen gave her view of what a novel should 
not be. She sheared away epic digressions, common- 
place moralizing, hysterical sentiment, the lovely 
weather of romance, and the prattle of young ladies 
to their confidantes about their beaux and sprigged 
muslin robes. In these very novels, but more directly 
in those conceived later, she took the same critical 
attitude toward the manners of her times. 

For her material Jane Austen never went outside 
her experience ; and accordingly nearly all her scenes 
are in South England. Her characters are taken 
mostly from the aristocracy and upper middle class 
of the English village and its vicinity. Incidentally 
there are accounts of the season at Bath with its fast 
set, and of the humble sailor life at Portsmouth and 
Lyme. She always has her young gentlemen with 
good incomes, who are seeking or ought to be seeking 
wives ; and young women not very well provided for, 
whom matchmaking mothers and aunts are trying to 
marry off ; and they themselves are glad to go. There 
are country clergymen, who in the course of the story 
get wives, unless, like Dr. Grant, they have them 
already ; and he gets, instead, a stall in Westminster, 
and dies of apoplexy 'brought on by three great 
institutionary dinners in one week.' There are gen- 
tlemanly villains, who induce beautiful girls to elope 
with them ; and their friends for family reasons pass 
by the incident, and provide for them liberally. The 
men seem to have no occupation, not even the clergy ; 
they attend balls, dine out, take part in private 



118 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

theatricals, talk about their horses, go up to London, 
and move about from estate to estate. The young 
women read romances, collect and transcribe riddles, 
thumb the harp or pianoforte, play whist five evenings 
in the week, drink tea, and eat buttered bread and 
baked apples; make garments for the poor, cut out 
stomachers for aunts, knit garters for grandmothers, 
take a little horseback riding for exercise, pick straw- 
berries, visit the estates of their future husbands, and 
work transparencies for their windows, ^ where Tin- 
tern Abbey holds its station between a cave in Italy 
and a moonlight lake in Cumberland.' All is pure 
comedy. ^ Let other pens,' Jane Austen wrote, ^ dwell 
on guilt and misery' — a rule to which she almost 
invariably held. The most prominent exception is a 
portrait of the slovenly Price family, done in the 
stern manner of the poet Crabbe. 

Beneath the whims and nonsense that bubble to the 
surface of her novels, there is an undercurrent of com- 
mon sense and respectable thinking. So consummate 
an artist as Jane Austen certainly did not make her 
characters a mere mouthpiece for herself, and yet in 
the selection and in the treatment of her material she 
spoke plainly her opinions and ideals. Young women 
had better marry husbands who can support them. 
Gentlemen suffering from ennui may find a very use- 
ful occupation in looking after their tenants. Her 
ideal of manhood was the heroism of the sea. In her 
most careful character-building, she considered, and 
gave due weight to, the bearing of early education, 
environment, wealth, and poverty ; and on the subject 
of heredity, she went somewhat beyond current humors 
and ruling passions. A guiding principle of hers was 



FROM 'HUMPHRY CLINKER' TO 'WAVERLEY' 119 

tliat the lighter conduct of men and women results 
from their being dupes of misconception. ^ One takes 
up a notion and lets it run away with him/ as when 
the Eev. William Collins imagines that his fair cousin 
Elizabeth will jump at an opportunity of becoming his 
wife. ' One believes herself in the secret of every- 
body's feelings, and with unpardonable arrogance 
proposes to arrange everybody's destiny ; ' such are 
the irrepressible matchmakers, and the inexperienced 
Emma, who at length sees the almost tragic conse- 
quences of Hhe blunders of head and heart.' Herein, 
in the detailed application to life of Bacon's Idols of 
the Cave and the Market Place, lies in a large measure 
the humor of Jane Austen. The reader, being in the 
secret, looks on at the mistaken and mistaking actors, 
seeing men and women, variously obtuse, moving in 
shadows and half-lights. This is a delicate psycho- 
logical humor akin to the higher comedy of Shake- 
speare. 

No novelist since Fielding had been a master of 
structure. Fielding constructed the novel after the 
analogy of the ancient drama. 'Pride and Prejudice' 
has not only the humor of Shakespearean comedy, but 
also its technique. Elizabeth first meets Darcy at a 
village ball. She at once becomes prejudiced against 
him on account of the general hauteur of his bearing 
toward the village girls, and especially on account of 
a remark of his to his friend Bingley, which she over- 
hears — a remark to the effect that, though she is 
tolerable, she is not handsome enough to tempt him 
to dance with her. Jane Austen now displays very 
great skill in handling events to the deepening of 
Elizabeth's prejudice, and to the awakening of Darcy's 



120 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

love, in spite of his pride. When prejudice and proud 
love have reached the proper degree of intensity, she 
brings Elizabeth and Darcy together at the Hunsford 
Parsonage ; there is an arrogant and insulting pro- 
posal of marriage and an indignant refusal. From 
this scene on to the end of her story, Jane Austen 
is at her very best. By easy gradations, through a 
process of disillusioning, Elizabeth's prejudice van- 
ishes, and with its gradual vanishing goes on the 
almost pitiable humiliation of Darcy. The marriage 
of Elizabeth and Darcy is not merely a possible solu- 
tion of the plot ; it is as inevitable as the conclusion 
of a properly constructed syllogism or geometrical 
demonstration. For a parallel to workmanship of 
this high order, one can look only to Shakespeare, to 
such a comedy as ' Much Ado about Nothing.' 

Of ^ Pride and Prejudice' the author left behind 
her a playful criticism, which in part runs thus : * The 
work is rather too light and bright and sparkling ; it 
wants shade, it wants to be stretched out here and 
there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had, 
if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something 
unconnected with the story, an essay on writing, a 
critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buona- 
parte.' These questionable faults she undertook to 
correct in her last three novels. She went deeper. 
The transition from ^ Pride and Prejudice ' to ^ Mans- 
field Park' and ^Emma' is somewhat more pronounced 
than the transition from ^Much Ado about Nothing' 
to ^ Twelfth Night.' In ^ Persuasion ' she took as her 
central idea ^ the uncertainty of all human events and 
calculations.' Her characters were now inclined to 
come perilously near moralizing; but this was never 



FROM 'HUMPHRY CLINKER' TO 'WAVERLEY' 121 

excessive nor commonplace. Her sincere delight in 
the loveliness of the world about her, which she had 
kept to herself, because the language of the pictu- 
resque was ' worn and hackneyed,' she now gave some 
freedom of expression to, — especially to her love of 
the unclouded night and the sea. She placed in 
shadow many subordinate incidents and characters; 
some event of past years, briefly narrated, and some 
one living in London or in the North, briefly described, 
make themselves felt on the village comedy as it is 
acting. In this way, she made the story of Fanny 
Price appear but as a part of the wider life of her 
time. 

Jane Austen's novels have their momentum mostly 
in conversation, with which is combined narration in 
little patches. Description, too, does not stand by 
itself for more than a few sentences, but is knit 
into the narrative. Letters are frequently employed, 
usually serving the same purpose as the monologue 
or the soliloquy of the stage. This dilated drama 
moves forward slowly, but it always moves, for the 
reason that so little is introduced for its own sake. 
After a breakfast-table conversation, a visit, a walk, 
or an excursion, and by means of them, the characters 
are shifted about, new light is thrown upon them, and 
a step has been taken toward the final issue. 

The style of Jane Austen cannot be separated from 
herself or her method. It is the natural easy flowing 
garment of her mind, delighting in inconsistencies 
and infinite detail. It is so peculiarly her own that 
one cannot trace in it with any degree of certainty 
the course of her reading. There is in it no Dr. 
Johnson nor much Madame d'Arblay, both of whom 



122 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

she read and admired greatly. The only presences 
that can be detected there are Cowper the letter- 
writer, and Crabbe the village poet, of whom she once 
said she could fancy herself the wife, were she ever 
to marry. Her close scrutiny of a word before she 
used it, or at least let it stand, is illustrated by 
several little remarks in the course of her stories, as, 
for example, the observations on ^ nice ' in ^ North- 
anger Abbey ' : the day is nice, the walk is nice, 
young ladies are very nice, ^Udolpho' is the nicest 
book in the world, and the word itself is so nice that 
it does for everything. In the arrangement of words 
in the sentence for the unexpected turn, she attained 
to great skill; and she had an ear for the aesthetic 
values of a pleasing rhythm and cadence. When in 
' Persuasion ' (apparently the only instance of the 
kind) she became perplexed over the proper denoue- 
ment of her story, her ' felicity in the flow of words ' 
nevertheless remained with her. There, in the tenth 
chapter, among the last sentences she ever wrote, 
occurs this one: ^The sweet scenes of autumn were 
for a while put by, unless some tender sonnet, fraught 
with the apt analogy of the declining year, with de- 
clining happiness, and the images of youth, and hope, 
and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory.' 

Now when we come to bring together in a few 
sentences Jane Austen's contribution to fiction, it is 
quite clear what must be said. She was a realist. 
She gave anew to the novel an art and a style, which 
it once had had, particularly in Fielding, but which it 
had since lost. Fielding was master of two styles, 
the burlesque and the rich eloquence of the great 
orators and moralists ; he was at will Cervantic and 



FROM ' HUMPHRY CLINKER ' TO ' WAVERLEY ' 123 

Demosthenic. Jane Austen's style is the language of 
everyday life — even with a tinge of its slang — to 
■which she has added an element of beauty. In the 
manipulation of characters and events, she left much 
less to chance than did Fielding. The series of events 
by which Fielding gets Partridge from Somerset to 
the London playhouse, to frighten him with the ghost 
in ' Hamlet,' and to pay a compliment to Garrick, is 
very extraordinary, and it was so intended. Jane 
Austen brings together her village folk and their 
visitors, at the dinner-party and the ball, as naturally 
as they would meet in real life. There is never any 
question needing explanation why a certain young 
lady or a certain young gentleman happens to be 
present. It is not to be supposed that there ever 
occurred a ball just like that one in ' Mansfield Park,' 
or a strawberry party just like that one described in 
^Emma.' Jane Austen, like all country girls, was 
fond of dancing, and she not unlikely picked straw- 
berries; but it would be to misinterpret her art to 
infer that in these scenes she is merely transcribing 
actual experience. What she is doing is building up 
scenes in her imagination, taking details from various 
occasions. Furthermore, we are not to suppose that 
there ever existed a woman quite so silly as Mrs. 
Bennet, or a country clergyman obtuse in precisely 
the same way as Mr. Collins ; or a rattle exactly like 
Jack Thorpe, who hurries Catherine into his gig ' that 
the tumble may soon be over,' and refuses to take his 
sister out riding ^ because she has such thick ankles.' 
Fanny Price is no specialized portrait, a friend of the 
author's put into ' Mansfield Park ' as a compliment, 
but a country girl whose conduct is in perfect accord 



124 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

with her antecedents and surroundings. The matter 
of observation, in passing through Jane Austen's 
imagination, was never violently disturbed ; the par- 
ticular bias it received was from a delicate and de- 
lightful irony ; there was precisely that selection and 
recombination and heightening of incident and char- 
acter that distinguish the comedy of manners from 
real life. 



CHAPTER IV 

Nineteenth-century Romance 

1. Sir Walter Scott and the Historical Novel 

The realistic tendencies in fiction which were cul- 
minating in the refined comedy of Jane Austen, were 
in part arrested by Sir Walter Scott. The novel he 
wrote is of composite character. In it is the story of 
adventure, the realistic sketch of manners, and the 
saner elements of the Gothic romance ; and these vari- 
eties of the novel, blended, are placed in an historical 
background. 

The first of Scott's novels was published in 1814 ; 
the last, in 1831. The series, when brought to a close 
by failing health and then death, consisted of more 
than thirty novels and stories. To his contempora- 
ries he appeared 'to toss them off in careless profu- 
sion'; and they looked in vain, as they well might 
in recent literary history, for a phenomenon equally 
marvellous. The popularity of the 'Scotch novels' 
was so great, that the contemporary critic apologized 
for reviewing at all works that were everywhere 
bought, borrowed, and stolen. For reasons that cannot 
be well appreciated now, Scott did not publicly ac- 
knowledge himself as their author until 1827, and 
then it was done dramatically; but from the very 
beginning it was generally understood that they pro- 

125 



126 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

ceeded from Abbotsford. In November, 1814, Jeffrey 
wrote of 'Waverley' in the Edinburgh Review: *If 
it be the work of an author hitherto unknown, Mr. 
Scott would do well to look to his laurels.' 

Jane Austen, it was said, wrote comedies analogous 
to Shakespeare's. Scott endeavored to mould the loose 
romantic epic to the form of the historical drama. 
Whether, as in ^ Waverley,' he merely gave the story 
of adventure a dramatic ending, or, as in ^ The Bride 
of Lammermoor,' he was dramatic throughout, his 
romances have in evei^yinstance double plots. There 
are the deeds of the aristocracy; and there is the 
commonalty, among whom, as^n Shakespeare's his- 
tories, appear comic characters. In catenating the 
events of these plots and in uniting them into one, 
Scott was not so eminently successful as Jane Austen; 
for his work was extempore. Of her ' cropping and 
lopping ' he never thought, but sent off to the Ballan- 
tynes his pages as fast as he wrote them, while he 
imagined he heard the press ^thumping, clattering, 
and banging.' In consequence his style has not that 
subtle adjustment of words and phrases found in the 
great masters of English prose. 

But the mechanism of his plots and his sentence 
structure he almost concealed in the picturesque de- 
scriptions of romantic poetry. With the publication 
of 'Waverley,' ^ local color,' at which the romancers 
had made wild attempts, — Ann Kadcliffe and Jane 
Porter with most success, — definitely becomes a part 
of romantic fiction. ^Waverley' is really an un- 
rhymed ^Lady of the Lake.' Its scenes are in the 
open air, in the Highlands or on their verge. Edward 
Waverley first meets Kose Bradwardine of ^ paley gold ' 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 127 

hair in the garden of Tully-Veolan, amid fruit trees, 
flowers, and evergreens. Into the solitudes of a High- 
land glen, Flora Mac-Ivor of wild dark eyes lures 
Waverley, and there sings to him of the sleeping sons 
of the Gael, tuning her harp to the murmur of a 
distant waterfall, the sighing of the evening breeze, 
and the rustle of leaves. In the same glen she 
tells him why she cannot marry him. The High- 
landers march to the battle-field of Preston, in the 
fading starlight of morning, 'plunging into a heavy 
ocean of fog which rolls its white waves over the 
whole plain and the sea by which it is bounded.' The 
sun appears above the horizon; Hhe vapors rise like 
a curtain and show two armies in the act of closing.' 
Then comes the fierce yell and the butchery. In his 
prefaces and in his notes, Scott warns the tourist 
against supposing that he copies landscapes, old 
manor-houses, and castles, directly from nature; but 
he is equally careful to say that real scenes with 
which he is familiar have afforded him leading out- 
lines. His descriptions, interpreted Jji the language 
of criticism, are a wavering between the real and the 
ideal. The ideal mood prevails disagreeably when, 
as has been observed by Professor George Saintsbury, 
he lets, in the seventh chapter of 'The Antiquary,' 
' the huge disk ' of a setting sun sink into the ocean 
off the east coast of Scotland ; it prevails beautifully 
in his Eenaissance gardens and in his Ossianic glens 
and battle-fields. Eealism is in the ascendant when 
he describes a scene from Salisbury Crags, a Scotch 
village, or a peasant's cottage. 

Upon the drama of adventure with its bright back- 
ground Scott threw the shadows of superstition, f anati- 



128 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

cism, and crime. The romancers just before him seem 
to have known nothing of gypsies, bandits, and ruffians, 
and so they went in search of them into Spain, Italy, and 
Switzerland. Their demon was an imaginary being 
of gigantic stature, imported from the East; their 
ghost was a skeleton wrapped in decaying cerecloth, 
who had broken from his coffin. Scott knew of manor- 
houses where the ghost of the founder regularly made 
his appearance in chambers appropriated to his use, 
and in presentable dress. In youth and in manhood 
he associated with g;^_£easantry who believed that 
supernatural beings were around them, on the heath 
and among the hills, sent to'^^warn, counsel, and aid 
them; and their conduct was guided by that belief. 
Scott so represents them, and thus reaches the very 
heart of superstition. He takes you into a Highland 
cave and shows you what a real bandit is : ' not a 
stern, gigantic, ferocious figure,' but a man ^thin in 
person and low in stature, with light sandy-colored 
hair and small pale features.' He takes you down 
into Galloway, and shows you the real freebooter, 
the real ruffian, superstitious, cruel, impudent, and 
careless in manner. In more ideal characters, such 
as literature had not seen since Shakespeare's witches, 
he epitomizes the wildest superstitions of the North 
— in Meg Merrilies, Madge Wildfire, and Noma of 
the Fitful Head. And in ' Old Mortality,' where his 
imagination assumes a terrible gloom, he combines 
the hatred, malignancy, and superstitious insanity of 
fanaticism in Habakkuk Mucklewrath, the Camero- 
nian preacher of extenuated feature, and eyes, 'gray, 
wild and wandering.' 

Superstition is not always employed by Scott for 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 129 

darkening effects. It is employed humorously in 
' Woodstock/ and with fine psychology in ' The Bride 
of Lammermoor.' Frequently it is a tenuous liter- 
ary covering; as the spectre that appears to Fergus 
Mac-Ivor on a slip of moonshine, through his prison 
window, on the night before his execution, and smiles, 
and fades away ; and particularly the vision of Lovel 
as he sleeps in the Green Chamber hung with tapestry 
representing a sixteenth-century hunting scene. The 
huntsmen with their greyhounds, stags, and boars 
move about in the arras, and one leaves his station 
and stands by the bedside of the slumberer. In 
scenes like these is the very spirit of mediaeval 
dream poetry, of ' Blanche the Duchess ' and the 
^Eomance of the Rose.' 

As to how far Scott's men and women are true to 
life, critics were at variance in his own time and have 
been so ever since. In graceful eulogy, Scott often re- 
peated that the success of Miss Edgeworth's Irish 
stories was the main incentive to the publication of 
' Waverley.' What Miss Edgeworth^had done for 
Ireland, he would do for Scotland; he would bring 
before the public Scotch men and women speaking 
the Scotch dialect amid Scotch scenes. Because of 
this realistic aspect of his work, ' Waverley ' on its 
first appearance was discussed by Jeffrey not so much 
as a romance, as ^a Scotch Castle Rackrent.' 'Waver- 
ley ' and its immediate successors were filled with 
Scotch scenes, in the Edgeworth manner of light 
transcription, — drinking bouts of Scotch lairds and 
barristers, hunting and fishing excursions, shooting 
matches, the stagnant village and its vulgar rabble, 
the inn, the blacksmith's shop, the schoolhouse, and 



180 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

the peasant's cottage. And as a part of these scenes 
are some of Scott's best characters : Paulus Pleydell, 
Edie Ochiltree, Dandie Dinmont, David Deans and his 
daughter Jeanie. 

Scott's lairds, as the Baron of Bradwardine and 
Jonathan Oldbuck, with their musty learning and an- 
tiquarian knowledge, are largely traditional ; they are 
eighteenth-century humorists who have settled in Scot- 
land. Scott's artistic treatment of eccentricity, how- 
ever, is more realistic than Eielding's or Sterne's, for 
he shows how natural'lyUihe whimsical Scotch gentle- 
man grows out of his surroundings. The same skill, 
too, he disjDlays in his insanVwomen of heightened 
stature ; he is very careful to make clear how Scotch 
life produces a Noma, a Meg Merrilies, and a Madge 
Wildfire. So real are they to a Scotchman that he 
will insist he has seen and known these very un- 
canny creatures. It is noticeable that Scott's heroes 
and heroines — the characters that are married off 
or die in concluding chapters — are wholly literary. 
Edward Waverley and Bose Bradwardine are types 
rarely absent from Scott's novels. Like the hero 
and heroine of Teutonic mythology, they fall in love 
and marry, because the man is manly in form or 
deed, and the woman is fair. Eergus Mac-Ivor and 
his sister Elora are likewise poetic creations, Scott's 
ideal of the Celt, and probably the true ideal. Eergus 
is ambitious, passionate, and superstitious, and with 
gay heart dies for the cause that he has fought for. 
Elora, independent and beautiful, will choose her own 
husband. Waverley may go down into England, re- 
turn with an army, fall at her feet; then she may 
think him worthy of her affection. She is of the 



NINETEENTH- CENTURY ROMANCE 131 

race of the fairy mistresses of Celtic legend who 
compel their lovers to come to them in long voyages 
over lake and sea. Two of Scott's finely poetical 
heroines dwell apart from the rest, for they excite 
the deeper emotions as well as the aesthetic sense. 
They are Lncy Ashton, who spills the blood of her 
detested husband over the bridal chamber, and Jeanie 
Deans, the peasant girl of St. Leonard's Crags, who 
goes on foot to London through perils and dangers 
that she may plead with the queen for a sister's life. 
Thus Scott was a realist when dealing with lowly 
life; but his prevailing mood was romantic with the 
historical bias, as became his descent, education, and 
early surroundings. He was descended from a Bor- 
der chieftain who made raids into Cumberland; he 
passed his youth in view of Edinburgh Castle and 
the Eildon Hills, and for a period of years made 
excursions along the Borders and into the Highlands, 
conversing with old men and old women who could 
tell him what happened fifty years before. He began 
in his childhood to lay away in his jnemory the wild 
legends of his country, and when older he 'devoured' 
the mass of romantic literature that had been collect- 
ing for a half-century, — new editions of the old 
romances and ballads, and imitations of them written 
by the moderns. Toward him all the lines of the 
romantic revival converge. None of his novels were 
written to represent the state of manners contempo- 
raneous with publication; they all dipped into the 
past. Nearest to contemporary portraits were ' St. 
Ronan's Well ' and ^ The Antiquary,' which have as 
subject Scotch and English society around the year 
1800. From that date Scott traversed, with some 



132 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

lacunce, English and Scotch history back to the time 
of William Rnfus. The largest number of his ro- 
mances have to do with the reigns of the first three 
Georges ; his most distinctively historical novels have 
to do with the reigns of Elizabeth, the first James of 
England, and the Protectorate of Cromwell ; his his- 
tories in which there is the most romance have to do 
with the Crusades, the age of chivalry, and the struggles 
of the Stuart Pretenders to recover the throne of Eng- 
land. Taken all together, they form the most splendid 
series of historical scenes that fiction has yet produced. 
Of course no rigid histcrrical test should be applied 
to the Waverley novels, thoughvjii individual instances, 
as ^The Fortunes of Nigel,' they would stand the 
ordeal. They are primarily not history, but literature. 
As Shakespeare was the first to write an historical 
play that continued to attract theatre-goers, it was 
quite natural that Scott should take him as his 
master. Shakespeare read in Holinshed that Prince 
Henry ' slue lord Persie called Sir Henry Hotspurre,' 
and letting his imagination play on this bald state- 
ment, he worked up that impressive single combat 
scene between Hotspur and Prince Hal, with all its 
high poetry and rich detail from the age of chivalry. 
That is the literary and romantic treatment of history. 
Scott stands on an old battle-field, knowing some 
details of the battle that once took place there, and 
he constructs in his imagination the whole scene ; he 
places the armies, dresses up the combatants in appro- 
priate dialect and costume, arranges his moon, stars, 
and fog, and then lets the fight begin. He visits an 
old kirkyard where the Covenanters have long slept 
neglected; he raises them to life, and tells one just 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 133 

how they looked, what fantastic clothes they wore, 
and what strange and insane things they did, — how, 
that they might not murder their victim on the Sab- 
bath, they would set the clock forward, because ' the 
sun went hack on the dial ten degrees for intimating 
the recovery of holy Hezekiah.' He sees an old Nor- 
man castle in ruins, and knows just how it appeared 
when K-obin Hood and his merry men stormed it, and 
who were in it. He reads an old ballad on Cumnor 
Hall, a few pages in an antiquarian, a contemporary 
account of the revels at Kenilworth, and Shakespeare^s 
^Antony and Cleopatra,' and he has the facts and 
machinery of a great historical tragedy. 

Shakespeare believed himself justified in tampering 
with history for dramatic ends. He compressed events, 
changed their order, and introduced into his histories 
events which never occurred at all, and for which there 
was no authority in the chroniclers. Scott did the 
same thing ; and when criticised by Dr. Jonas Dryas- 
dust for doing so, he referred him to Shakespeare, 
and sent Miss Dryasdust a brand-new pair of spec- 
tacles. Scott, hoAvever, was not so skilled in manipu- 
lating history as was Shakespeare. Shakespeare — 
to give the substance of Coleridge's masterly defence 
of him — grouped and arranged his ' stars in the sky ' 
to the issue of a higher unity than that of chronological 
sequence. Scott was undoubtedly justified in making 
the murder of Amy Eobsart contemporary with Leices- 
ter's princely reception of Elizabeth at Kenilworth in 
1575, though it occurred fifteen years before. It was 
really necessary to do this, in order to combine in one 
picture the gayety, the display, and the crimes of the 
Elizabethan age. But when, in this same romance, he 



134 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

makes the schoolboy Shakespeare, then only eleven 
years old, the author of ' Venus and Adonis,' and a few 
years later, in ^ Woodstock,' implies that the dramatist 
died somewhere around 1590, before he had written 
one great play, our sense of historical propriety re- 
ceives a shock. Probably every one of Scott's novels 
contains similar deviations from history, some of 
which were made purposely, and others no doubt from 
carelessness or ignorance. These slips, though so 
glaring as mistakes in heraldry, armor, and geography, 
he never corrected for his critics, but coolly called 
their attention to others^^frhich they had not observed. 

The main interest in Scott's historical novels is 
often not historical, and the historical interest is at 
least always divided with a purely fictitious interest. 
In ' Waverley'the hero and heroine are not historical; 
and the same is true of ^Old Mortality,' ^Ivanhoe,' 
' The Fortunes of Nigel,' and ' The Abbot.' ' Kenil- 
worth ' is different only in appearance. Amy Eobsart 
bears an historical name, but she is really the typical 
tragic heroine, and Leicester is the conventional villain 
with some facts taken from the Earl of Leicester's 
life for an historical semblance. The attention is thus 
distracted from Elizabeth, Mary, James, Cromwell, 
and the young Stuart Pretenders. In adopting this 
method of dealing with history — which was in part 
Shakespeare's also — Scott was able to give within 
the vaguely defined boundaries of fact and legend a 
very free play to his imagination. 

From Scott nearly all the successful historical nov- 
elists since his time have learned their craft. This is 
not tantamount to saying that his management of 
history is definitive. It is only one of the successful 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 135 

ways in the evolution of a form. The modern histori- 
cal romance, as has been seen, was the creation of John 
Barclay. As he wrote it, it was allegorical, and yet 
fully satisfactory to the seventeenth century, when 
one of the conventions of literature was to hold 
before life a thin veil. Defoe manufactured history ; 
that, too, was for a time pleasing. The romanticists, 
later in the eighteenth century, put well-known his- 
torical characters through the adventures of the Smol- 
lett novel. Scott and a small company of novelists 
before him constructed an historical background 
sprinkled with a few historical characters, and placed 
in the foreground imaginary figures. This union oi 
fact and fiction has prevailed, with some exceptions to 
be noted, throughout the nineteenth century. It may 
not be the fixed type of the historical novel. There 
yet remains to be written a novel in which historical 
characters shall be brought to the front and kept 
there. 

And finally, the real power of Scott's novels, that 
which makes them of perennial interest, is not merely 
their romance, their accumulation of historical facts, 
their Scotch dialect, and smattering of obsolete words 
— their local coloring. All these are accessories, 
which as time goes on will be pleasing to one age and 
displeasing to another. Beneath all is human nature, 
which is practically the same in all times. Men love, 
and men hate, they are faithful to their promises and 
they are treacherous, they are sometimes wise and 
sometimes foolish ; they always have been and always 
will be thus, and Scott in a comprehensive outlook 
over long stretches of Scotch and English history 
has so represented them. The novel he wrote is 



136 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

essentially, as Eielding's, a human epic, but placed 
back, as lie chose, a few years or many centuries. 

Yet in the matter of formal ethics, Scott com- 
pletely broke away from Fielding. Even the Gothic 
romancer had his moral. ' I am, I own,' wrote Scott, 
*no great believer in the moral utility to be derived 
from fictitious compositions.' ^ He never preached. 
Possessing a healthy, buoyant spirit, he let it per- 
meate his work, and with that he was satisfied. 

2. S^otl^s Legacy 

Sir Walter Scott is the greatest force that has yet 
appeared in English fiction. He had the pleasure of 
seeing, some years before he ceased writing, rivals 
enter the field against him from Scotland, England, 
and the United States, and some of them with the 
professed intention of vanquishing him on his own 
ground. Even an appreciable fraction of what they 
wrote can be learned only by looking over lists of 
publications in contemporary periodicals. A count of 
the romances mainly or partially historical announced 
in BlackwoocVs Magazine for 1825, as just published 
or about to be published, runs above twenty-five. 
Among them are : ' Eameses, an Egyptian Tale, with 
Historical Notes of the Era of the Pharaohs ' ; * New 
Landlord's Tales ; or Jedediah in the South ' ; ' An- 
selmo; a Tale of Italy, illustrative of Eoman and 
Neapolitan Life from 1789 to 1809 ' ; ' Thomas Fitz- 
gerald, the Lord of Offaley, and Lord Deputy of 
Ireland, a Eomance of the Sixteenth Century ' ; ' Lionel 
Lincoln ' ; ' London in the Olden Time ; or Tales in- 

1 Introduction to ' Fortunes of Nigel.' 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 137 

tended to illustrate some of the Localities, and Man- 
ners and Superstitions of its Inhabitants from the 
Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century'; 'A Peep at The 
Pilgrims, 1636 ' ; ^ The Abduction ; or The Adventures 
of Major Sarney; a Story of the Time of Charles 
IL' ; ' Ned Clinton ; or, the Commissary ; comprising 
Adventures and Events during the Peninsular War, 
with Curious and Original Anecdotes of Military and 
other Remarkable Characters ' ; ' The Adventurers ; or 
Scenes in Ireland in the Days of Elizabeth ' ; ' Loch- 
andhu, a Tale of the Eighteenth Century ' ; ' The Last 
of the Lairds ' ; ' The Refugee ; a Romance, by Cap- 
tain Murgatroyd ' ; . ^ William Douglas, or the Scotch 
Exiles ' ; '• Eustace Fitz-Richard ; a Tale of the Barons' 
Wars, by the author of " The Bandit Chief " ' ; ' The 
Twenty-ninth of May ; or Joyous Doings at the Res- 
toration, by Ephraim Hardcastle ' ; ' Sephora, a He- 
brew Tale,' which promises to contain 'a minute 
description of Palestine, and of the manners and 
customs of the ancient Israelites.' Of these seven- 
teen romances, only two have escaped oblivion — one 
by Cooper and one by Gait. A list for any other of 
the last six years of Scott's life (1824-32) would 
not greatly vary in number from this ; its novelty 
would consist in the indications of different scenes 
and different historical periods. 

Scott also — to use his own phrase — ^ set the 
chimes a-ringing ' in France, Germany, and Italy. 
Under the title of ^Walladmor,' a Waverley novel 
was forged for the Leipzig Fair in 1824. The author 
of this mystification was Wilhelm Haring, who lived 
to write many similar histories, and to be honored as 
the German Sir Walter Scott. About 1830, a Silesian 



138 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

boy, by name Gustav Freytag, was reading Scott's 
novels, one after the other, ^with ever increasing 
delight.' Forty years later he began ' The Ancestors ' 
(^Die Ahnen'), a collection of historical and military 
tales connected by the thread of heredity. The work 
of Georg Ebers is everywhere known. To these three 
writers might be easily added a score more, who, like 
Scott, constructed a national and patriotic epic. In 
1824, Alessandro Manzoni published the first instal- 
ments of 'The Betrothed' ('I Promessi Sposi'), a 
masterly introspective lio^tel with an historical set- 
ting. This was the beginning of Scott in Italy. As 
far back as Calprenede, France had the historical 
novel, which lingered on through the eighteenth cen- 
tury. In 1826 it was revived in the poetic and anti- 
quarian manner of Scott, by Alfred de Vigny in 
'Cinq-Mars.' De Vigny was followed by Prosper 
Merimee with 'La Chronique du regne de Charles 
IX.' (1829). Then came Victor Hugo's 'Notre-Dame 
de Paris ' (1830-31) ; and then the enormous output of 
the elder Dumas and his collaborators. 

The immense vogue of Scott is undoubtedly to be 
explained in part by the mood of Europe in the first 
quarter of the century. Scott and the romancers 
accompanying him are a reflection of the militarism 
of the period and of an aristocratic revolt from the 
levelism of the French Revolution. Still the success 
of Scott is not mainly to be thus accounted for. He 
hit upon a kind of novel elastic enough to contain 
about everything in fiction which pleases; and he 
thereby appealed to various orders of mind. For the 
romantic he had his gorgeous scenes ; for lovers of 
mystery he had secrets to be disclosed in the third 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 139 

volume, and sliding panels and trap-doors for the 
entrances and exits of ghosts ; for lovers of wild 
adventure he had caves, prisons, crypts, bandits, and 
hairbreadth escapes ; for those who turn to the novel 
for a description of manners he furnished probably 
as accurate transcripts of real life as are to be found 
in the professed realists. 

It was with this species of novel, so easy to imitate, 
that the second romantic revival of English fiction 
opened, as the first had opened with the Gothic tale 
of terror. In spite of a very strong reaction against 
romance in Scott's own time, which led to the reha- 
bilitation of other forms of fiction, romance and a fan- 
tastic treatment of real life continued their sway down 
to about 1850, when Thackeray and others took a 
stand for realism. The story of this legacy of Scott to 
English fiction we will now proceed to tell in outline. 
Mere blundering imitators we shall pass by or touch 
upon lightly, and dwell upon those writers who modi- 
fied and, in some respects, improved upon Scott's own 
model, or turned romantic fiction into new directions. 

Among the successors to Scott first in the field was 
Mrs. Anna Eliza Bray. Beginning her romancing iii 
1825, she gained a public three years later by 'The 
Protestant,' the subject of which is the persecution of 
the Protestants under Queen Mary Tudor. Though 
purely historical in intent, the romance had the 
appearance of a flaming brand, thrown by the high 
church party into the angry debate over Catholic 
emancipation. After various experiments, Mrs. Bray, 
in 1830, ' struck out a new path in the field of ro- 
mance,' and for a time was kept from wandering out 
of that path by the excellent advice of Eobert Southey, 



140 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 



'her friend and idol/ Her subject now became the 
scenes, the antiquities, the traditions, and the family- 
histories of Devon and Cornwall. This series of ' The 
Romances of the West ' comprises ^ Fitz of Fitzford,' 
'Warleigh,' ^Courtenay of Walreddon,' 'Trelawny 
of Trelawne,' ' Henry de Pomeroy,' ' Hartland Forest,' 
and ' Roseteague.' These romances, popular for a 
quarter of a century and still worth reading, are 
representative of a tendency thus early toward special- 
ization. If Devon may have its historian, so may 
Lancashire. *> — ^ 

Horace Smith also practised the historical novel. 
His ' Brambletye House ' (182fy is a good example 
of the working of the time-spirit; for the first of 
its three volumes covers the same period as Scott's 
'Woodstock,' and was published in the same year. 
It was followed by ' The Tor Hill,' ' Eeuben Apsley,' 
' Oliver Cromwell,' ' Arthur Arundel, or a tale of the 
English Revolution of 1688,' and some others. No 
one would ever dream that they emanated from the 
brain that helped produce the 'Rejected Addresses,' 
which are among the cleverest burlesques in our 
language. Smith's lightness, wit, and humor seem 
to have evaporated as soon as he touched the novel, 
and to have left as a residuum only the dullest prose. 
But in ' Brambletye House,' once regarded as his most 
successful effort, he made passably vivid the vagabond 
condition of the cavaliers during the supremacy of 
Cromwell. He drew good sketches of Milton and 
Marvel, of Charles the Second, Rochester, Nell Gwyn, 
and Lady Castlemain. The most generous judgment 
that can be passed upon his work as a whole is, that 
he endeavored to arrive at the truth of history. 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 141 

From the productivity of Scott it was inferred that 
a writer's talent should be measured by the literary 
output. His imitators let it be known how many 
pages they wrote daily, in how many weeks they put 
together their volumes, and how many novels they 
could keep going simultaneously. Between 1825 and 
1850, G. P. R. James wrote fully a hundred novels 
and tales ; some long, some short, most of them his- 
torical, and the first of them — ^ Richelieu,' written in 
1825, published in 1829 — famous for Thackeray's 
burlesque of it. Whether he chose as his scene 
England, France, Italy, or Germany, all his historical 
romances were constructed according to one formula. 
They commonly opened with two horsemen riding in 
the midst of grand or beautiful scenery, or with an 
invocation to them before they were introduced. On 
rare occasions the horsemen were omitted, and for 
them were substituted two mysterious travellers at 
an inn, conversing in subdued tones over their cups. 
There were always lovely heroines whose figures 
harmonized with the landscape, and soft and sweet 
moralizings. All this was but preliminary to being 
brought face to face with great historical characters 
— a Philip, a Louis, Henry the Eighth, or Cardinal 
Wolsey — described minutely and conscientiously. 

Contemporary with James was William Harrison 
Ainsworth, whose popularity began with ^ Rookwood ' 
(1834), and lasted for full twenty years. Throughout 
this period he sought the aid of the most gifted illus- 
trators, among whom was Cruikshank. The main 
effort of Ainsworth was directed to the rehearsal of 
historical cruelties and crimes, which he treated, not 
for the purpose of tragedy, but for picturesque or 



142 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

comic effect. Executions, which Scott threw the veil 
over, he thrust into the full light of day, analyzing 
the sensations of the condemned as he lays his head 
on the block and the executioner raises the gleaming 
axe. His style was purposely flippant : for example, 
his highwayman looks forward with resignation to 
the time when he shall ^be put to bed with a mattock, 
and tucked up with a spade.' * Rookwood ' is a cross 
between the Gothic romance and the Newgate Calen- 
dar. Details in the taste of ^ Frankenstein ' are made 
endurable, by being brouglit into juxtaposition with 
the old English squirarchy and the brilliant feats of 
Dick Turpin and his associatesSjn the road. Dick's 
ride on 'Black Bess' from London to York, with 
bridle reins in his teeth and a pistol in each hand, 
is a spirited piece of descriptive narration, which has 
become a classic in rogue literature. The romance 
is placarded with the date 1737, and is throughout 
English in its setting. A less Gothic and less imagi- 
native reproduction of criminal life is 'Jack Shep- 
pard' (1839). 

In his more regularly constructed histories, Ains- 
worth is a link between French and English romance. 
Hugo's ' Notre-Dame de Paris' is a romance of an 
order very different from any of Scott's ; it is further 
from reality, it is more highly charged with poetry, 
fantasy, and passion. Its action centres about Notre- 
Dame, to which — its bells, its arches, and its towers 
— Hugo lends a personality, so that the magnificent 
cathedral pulsates with a sort of galvanized life. A 
romance like this invites imitation ; for it is so elastic 
that the introduction is made easy of many chapters 
and even whole sections on the history of the struc- 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 143 

ture, on the dark deeds committed within its walls, 
and on the comparative merits of Greek and Gothic 
art. Ainsworth's best-known histories are English 
reilections of ^Notre-Dame de Paris.' Such are ^The 
Tower of London' (1840), 'Old Saint Pauls' (1841), 
and ' Windsor Castle ' (1843) ; the main plots of which 
have to do with the career of Lady Jane Grey, the 
great plague and the great fire of London, and Henry 
the Eiglith's bloody experiences with his wives. When 
Ainsworth left his house-breakers, prison-breakers, and 
gentlemen of the road for the illustration of Gothic 
buildings, it was but for the portrayal of crime on a 
grander scale and in more picturesque surroundings. 
In their final analysis, all his historical romances are 
melodramas. Ainsworth had a wide following among 
contributors to popular periodicals, such as Bentley^s 
Miscellany, AinswortVs Magazine, The London Journal, 
The JSfeiD Monthly Magazine, and Reynolds's Miscellany. 
Bulwer-Lytton produced five historical romances : 
' Devereux ' (1829), ' The Last Days of Pompeii ' (1834), 
'Rienzi ' (1835), 'The Last of the Barons ' (1843), and 
'Harold' (1848). To these is to be added the incom- 
plete 'Pausanias,' published posthumously in 1876. 
With the exception of ' Devereux ' and ' The Last of 
the Barons,' their subjects are evident from the 
titles ; of these two, the former is a philosophical 
romance of the eighteenth century, and in the latter, 
the last baron is the mighty Earl of Warwick, the 
kingmaker, who put Edward the Eourth on the throne 
only to depose him, and who was at length defeated 
by Edward and slain in the battle of Barnet (1471). 
Scott's model was Shakespeare; Bulwer's, ^schylus 
and Sophocles. Bulwer was inclined to take as the 



144 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

climax of his story some great turning-point in history, 
as the clash of new and old ideas ; and he approached 
his objective point by the road of a long epic narra- 
tion, compiled from huge commonplace books, into 
which he had transcribed from the historians what he 
thought might be of use to him. Countless details 
which Scott would have cast aside, Bulwer put bodily 
into his narrative. The result was more history, less 
imagination, and a slower movement. 

It will be remembered that the usual method of the 
historical romancers anterior to Scott was to select a 
group of historical characters, and to invent for them 
a series of adventures. What they really did was 
to write a Smollett novel, manipulated by characters 
bearing historical names. Scott brought together his- 
torical characters and events, and characters and 
events wholly fictitious. ' The Last Days of Pompeii ' 
was a successful novelty. Bulwer climbed Mt. Vesu- 
vius, studied Italian antiquities, observed Italian man- 
ners, and had behind all a wide reading in Latin 
literature and Greek philosophy. He realized in his 
imagination Pompeii and its decadent life just before 
the eruption of Vesuvius, and then, not having any 
historical characters with contemporary biographies 
as a guide, he created imaginary characters such as 
he thought were in harmony with the period. Others 
— and one of them was Lockhart — had attempted the 
classic novel and had failed. Probably no historical 
romance has had more readers than ' The Last Days 
of Pompeii.' 

Though it was not in perfectly good taste for Bulwer 
to speak, as he did, of the art of his predecessors 
(meaning Scott) as ^ Picturesque ' and of his own, in 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 145 

contrast to theirs, as ^ Intellectual/ yet there is truth 
in the remark ; and this brings us to a second original 
element in Bulwer. In ' The Last of the Barons,' he 
looked at history from the standpoint of the philoso- 
pher and the psychologist. The broils of Edward's 
reign it was his business not only to portray but to 
interpret. He thoroughly discussed the social forces 
that rendered inevitable the rise of the middle classes 
and the fall of Warwick ; he probed for the motives 
that actuated the intrigues at court and Warwick in 
the final stand he took against his king. This, Bul- 
wer's masterpiece in historical fiction, is a Kultur- 
geschichte. 

Charles Kiugsley also had very great tact in select- 
ing dramatic crises for the climax of his romances. 
^Hypatia' (1853) still remains the sublimest subject 
that historical fiction has appropriated to its use — 
the death struggle between Greek and Christian civili- 
zation in the fifth century. Well might Kingsley say 
when at work on 'Hypatia,' ' If I fail in it, I may as 
well give up writing.' Befcre KingSiey, historical fic- 
tion had been written either to please, or to instruct 
in historical fact. Kingsley had other aims to which 
he did not scruple to sacrifice. He was out of patience 
with a tendency in the thought of his time to exalt 
Greek letters and philosophy, at the expense of Chris- 
tianity and the art and literature that have come in 
its train. This paganism, which had been expressed 
with deep lyrical longing in Schiller's ^Die Gotter 
Griechenlands,' he set out to counteract. A second 
purpose is unmistakably conveyed in his sub-title to 
^ Hypatia ' : ' New Foes with an Old Face.' Kingsley 
was bitterly anti-Roman, and wished to arrest the move- 



146 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

ment toward E-ome that Newman had given the Church, 
of England. These ulterior aims lent to ' Hypatia ' a 
modern tone, making out of it a novel of aggressive 
purpose. But they stood in the way of real history. 
What purports to be historical fact in ' Hypatia ' Leslie 
Stephen ^ has pronounced a bubble that bursts on the 
most delicate touch ; the Church of Eome as therein 
represented is not the church of the fifth century, 
and the Goths are mythical. Certainly no one should 
quarrel with a romancer for misrepresenting history, 
provided his purpose is nat^thical, and that he states 
frankly that he is not writing history. Scott, for ex- 
ample, was quick to acknowledge that ^ Ivanhoe ' was 
Froissart modernized. But Kingsley asserted that, 
even where he was not writing authentic history, he 
was true to the life, the manners, and the spirit of 
the fifth century. Whatever may have been their 
immediate effect, Kingsley's hysterics against Eoman- 
ism are now gay comedy, giving a pleasing relish to 
^Hypatia.' When Kingsley denounced the ancient 
church, he also weakened faith in the church he 
adored. Such is the irony of purpose. ^Hypatia,' 
like Schiller's poem, is a beautiful lament over the 
passing of the gods. 

Thackeray, as a boy, read his ^ dear Walter Scott ' ; 
in mature life, he burlesqued him, and then wrote 
^ Henry Esmond' (1852) and ^The Virginians' (1857- 
59). Thackeray stripped the muse of history of her 
mask and cothurnus, and requested her to lay aside 
the voice and manners of the stage. She may, if she 
likes, rehearse the doings of royalty and generals, but 
she must also tell of ' burning farms, wasted fields, 

1 ' Hours in a Library,' third series, London, 1879. 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 147 

shrieking women, slaughtered sons and fathers, and 
drunken soldiery/ Thackeray denied her, too, all 
her usual adornments. There are in 'Esmond' no 
wanderings by the way into architecture, antiquities, 
sunrises, sunsets, fair prospects, and ' dearly beloved 
readers.' The men and women of the eighteenth cen- 
tury appear in his pages in their habit as they lived, 
whether the characters be historical, as Steele, Addi- 
son, Marlborough, and Wolfe ; or whether they be 
purely fictitious, as Esmond, Beatrix, and the Castle- 
woods. It had been the aim of all the historical 
romancers to suggest the past by sprinkling their 
pages with obsolete words — trow, weet, shoon, yclept, 
emprise, etc. The attempts at a more accurate repro- 
duction of old style than by taking these words from 
Spenser had not met with public favor, owing chiefly 
to the fact that the periods selected were in the Mid- 
dle Ages, when the English language was in appear- 
ance quite different from what it is to-day. Since the 
age of Queen Anne our speech has undergone no 
important changes in grammar or ja spelling. But 
the style of that period has a peculiar classic 
flavor, easily felt, with difficulty expressed, and with 
greater difficulty imitated, as every one knows who 
has been so bold as to try his hand at a Spectator 
paper. Thackeray caught precisely its spirit ; he did 
not write like Addison or Steele or Bolingbroke, but 
as one of their friends and companions. 

Just as in Ainsworth appeared Scott indirectly 
through Hugo, so in ' Esmond ' may be observed Scott 
through Dumas. Dumas wrote history much as Defoe 
would have done, had Defoe followed the romantic 
revival instead of coming before it. Dumas made 



148 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

history a background for imaginary adventure and 
sword-play, originating a species of novel which, the 
French aptly call le roman de cape et d'ejjee. ^ Esmond ' 
differs from the D'Artagnan romances in that it is 
more faithful to the spirit of fact; otherwise it is 
analogous. Two incidents of this novel, somewhat 
in the manner of Dumas, criticism has long reckoned 
among the very greatest in romance, for they are 
strokes of genius. The one takes place at the dinner- 
table of Prince Eugene in Lille, where, besides the 
English ofiS.cers, are present the ^Prince of Savoy, 
the Electoral Prince of Hanover, and the envoys of 
Prussia and Denmark.' GeneraUVebb, who has just 
read the London Gazette, in which the Duke of Marl- 
borough has not given him the deserved credit for the 
victory of Wynendael, rises, draws his sword, thrusts 
it through the Gazette, and, bending forward to his 
superior of&cer, says with the utmost courtesy : ' Per- 
mit me to hand it to your Grace.' The other incident 
occurs in an upper chamber at Castlewood, when 
Colonel Esmond and Frank Castlewood break their 
swords in the presence of the Stuart Pretender, thus 
denying him, and the colonel gives him the satisfac- 
tion of a gentleman : — 

' Eh. bien, Vicomte,' says the young Prince, who was a hoy, 
and a French boy, ' il ne nous reste qu'une chose k faire ; ' he 
placed his sword upon the table, and the fingers of his two 
hands upon his breast : — ' We have one more thing to do,' says 
he ; ' you do not divine it ? ' He stretched out his arms : — 
' Emhrassons nous ! ' 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 149 

3. Tlie Romance of War 

The romance of war as a deviation from the ordinary 
historical novel made its appearance in the second 
quarter of the nineteenth century, when the imagina- 
tion began to clothe the events which led up to 
Waterloo in the high colors of a romance, of which 
the heroes were Napoleon and Wellington. It is the 
historical novel as the soldier writes it, or one who 
has come into contact with some phase of military 
life ; its characters are privates and minor officers, 
with now and then a glimpse at a general ; and its 
scenes are in the barrack and the camp, and on the 
battle-field. The flow of military autobiographies and 
fictions is very noticeable in 1825, when appeared 
the anonymous ^Ned Clinton,' and G. R. Gleig's 
' Subaltern ' (Blackwood^ s Magazine), both of which 
deal with Wellington in Spain. The stream was fed 
by W. H. Maxwell, Charles Lever, and James Grant ; 
the first was an Irishman ; the second, born in Dublin, 
was Irish on the maternal side; and 'the last was a 
Scotchman. Not aspiring to a regularly constructed 
novel. Maxwell wrote tales more or less connected 
and usually autobiographic in appearance. It was 
his way to begin with pictures of the wild life in the 
extreme west of Ireland, where he passed many years, 
enjoying a church living without the burden of a con- 
gregation; to bring on the scene an English regi- 
ment stationed at Connemara for the purpose of 
dislodging illicit distillers of ^ dew ' among the moun- 
tains, and then to go over to the Continent with his 
Englishmen and Irishmen, to Spain and to Waterloo. 
Representative of his work are ^ Stories of Waterloo * 



150 DEVELOPMENT OE THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

(1834) and ^ The Bivouac, or Stories of the Peninsular 
War' (1837). Lever was a friend of Maxwell, and 
from him he took his cue of writing sketches rather 
than novels. The points of departure were greater 
length and greater stress on the humorous anecdote. 
There was no limit to the funny stories and hoaxes 
Lever was able to reel off at will in ' Harry Lorrequer/ 
^Charles O'Malley/ and ' Tom Burke of Ours.' 

Grant wrote with more attention to structure. The 
first of his novels, ^The Romance of War, or the 
Highlanders in Spain'~^845), opens with scenes of 
love-making in Perthshire; t^ hero serves as ensign, 
in the ninety-second regiment, or Gordon Highlanders, 
during the Peninsular campaign and later at Waterloo ; 
and, after a career of bravery, duelling, and flirtation, 
he returns to Scotland, marries Alice, and is ' the hap- 
piest of men.' By the way are detailed accounts of 
Spanish manners, and some good sketches of typical 
Spanish character. The battle scenes are attempts to 
narrate what really happened; the fiction is in the 
love-romance and the personal affairs and experiences 
of the hero when off duty. ' The Bomance of War ' 
was the best work of its kind that had yet been writ- 
ten ; in it the military novel got a distinct form, and 
on its scaffolding Grant constructed fifty other popular 
histories. 

4. James Fenimore Cooper, and the Romance of the 

Forest and the Sea 

When the romantic wave reached the United States, 
the possibility of an American historical novel was 
discussed to the conclusion that America had no his- 
tory before the Bevolution, and that the events of that 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 151 

struggle were too recent for treatment. Still, there 
were some essays at history. In 1792, the Rev. 
Jeremy Belknap published an American tale entitled 
^ The Foresters,' in which is given an allegorical ac- 
count of the colonial settlements. Mr. Bull is repre- 
sented as dividing a vast forest among his fourteen 
servants, John Cod-line, Peter Bull-frog, etc., who are 
always quarrelling with their neighbors on the north 
and on the south — Mr. Lewis and Mr. Strut. Equally 
curious is ^The Asylum; or Alonzo and Melissa' 
(1811), by Isaac Mitchell. It belongs to the class 
of half-Gothic and half-historical tales that were then 
appearing in England, and its title would indicate a 
specific connection with Sophia Lee's ^Recess.' It 
has a castle, situated in western Connecticut, in which 
the heroine is locked up to be frightened by dark 
shadows, strange footsteps and whisperings, and balls 
of fire rolling through the halls. It describes in flam- 
boyant language colonial manners just before the 
Revolution, and a sea fight between the British and 
the Americans, in which, after ^the decks were piled 
with carnage and the scuppers spouted blood,' the 
British struck their colors and their frigate was glori- 
ously sunk. The historical character we see most of 
is Dr. Eranklin, giving the good advice of ^ Poor 
Richard ' to the hero, who is a graduate of Yale col- 
lege. Washington Irving, who in ^Knickerbocker's 
History of New York ' (1809) worked the vein opened 
by Belknap, left two thoroughly American pieces, 
' Rip Van Winkle ' and ' The Legend of Sleepy Hol- 
low.' Cooper's ' Spy ' (1821), which at once attained 
a world-wide fame, and has kept it, is written on the 
plan of Defoe's ' Memoirs of a Cavalier.' It is a romance 



152 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

of the Eevolution, with, meagre historical founda- 
tion. At genuinely historical work, requiring the 
examination of historical documents, Cooper was, 
so far as posterity is concerned, an utter failure. 
^Lionel Lincoln,' with its graphic and accurate de- 
scription of the battle of Bunker Hill, is no longer read. 
Hawthorne did some perfect work in the historical 
sketch, as in 'The Gray Champion' and 'Endicott and 
the Eed Cross.' More than this he did not attempt. 

Though the writers in the United States thus ac- 
complished very littlein history, in pure romance 
they, however, not only did respectable work, but in 
some ways excelled their British cousins. Some years 
before the Revolution, settlers in Virginia and the 
Carolinas broke through the passes of the Blue Eidge 
into Kentucky and Tennessee. This westward move- 
ment, impeded by the outbreak of the Revolution, 
reappeared after the peace of 1783, in emigration from 
New England to western New York and Ohio. Another 
check came with the war of 1812. At its close the 
children of the first wave of emigration pushed farther 
on, spreading along the river valleys of the limitless 
West. This frontier life early found its way into 
American literature, as in Charles Brockden Brown. 
Its romance was immortalized by James Fenimore 
Cooper, in ' The Leather-Stocking Tales,' comprising 
'The Pioneers' (1823), 'The Last of the Mohicans' 
(1826), ' The Prairie ' (1827), ' The Pathfinder ' (1840), 
and 'The Deerslayer' (1841). Cooper passed his 
youth in the border village of Cooperstown, on Ot- 
sego Lake, by the source of the Susquehanna. ' The 
Pioneers ' is a reminiscence of his boyhood, and must 
be taken as a realistic picture of Avhat he had seen. 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 153 

In the other Leather-Stocking stories, the scene changes 
to Glens Falls, the great i^rairies of the middle West, 
Lake Ontario, and back to Otsego Lake. They all 
bear some date, but in reality they have no very 
precise historical background. It is sufficient to place 
them somewhere in the eighteenth century. Except 
^ The Pioneers,' they are all, in Cooper's phrase, pure 
legends. 

Cooper was a poet. How tame is Mrs. Eadcliffe's 
or Charlotte Smith's romancing of the forests, when 
compared with that of the man who had lived in them. 
The aspects of the North American forests that most 
impressed Cooper were their boundlessness and their 
mystery. He noted their changes, their ever varying 
tints in light and shade, the rich and glorious coloring 
of an ocean of leaves in an autumn sunset, their 
sinister darkness as the storm-cloud hovers over them, 
the moaning of mighty branches, the crash of some 
falling giant and the reverberation through the wilder- 
ness, and the mountain in flames. What he hated 
was the woodman's axe. Of these boundless, mys- 
terious, living forests, Cooper created two captivating 
inhabitants, Chingachgook and Nathaniel Bumppo, 
otherwise known, from his long deerskin leggings, as 
Leather-Stocking. They are constructed on a plan 
which, though the romancer had often tried it, had 
never been very successful, that of uniting in one per- 
son the characteristics of two races. Chingachgook is 
an Indian who in his intercourse with the English set- 
tlers acquires some of the best qualities of his new asso- 
ciates, and preserves at the same time the endurance, 
fortitude, and scalp-loving instincts of the savage 
state. Leather-Stocking Cooper followed in detail after 



154 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

detail from youth to old age. In ^The Deerslayer' 
he appears as a mere boy. Here he shoots his first 
Indian, and with Chingachgook enters upon his first 
war-path ; he is first tempted by a scarlet woman, and 
triumphs, telling her that his only sweetheart is in 
the soft rain, the blue heavens, and the sweet springs 
where he slakes his thirst. In ^The Last of the 
Mohicans ' he is in the prime of youth, and, because 
of his sure shot, is known as Hawkeye. He is subtle 
in dealing with his enemies, skilful in discovering 
and following up th^_fcrail, and alert for all the 
sounds of the woods. In ^The Pathfinder,' still a 
young man, he is in love w'ith Mabel Dunham, the 
most lovable of Cooper's heroines, who is given to 
Jasper as a more fitting match. In 'The Pioneers' 
he appears as an old man above seventy ; shouldering 
his gun and calling his dog, he bids farewell to his 
friends and turns his face toward the Great Lakes. 
In 'The Prairie' he is invested with great dignity 
and tenderness. Here he is introduced as a trapper 
in the region of the upper Missouri, driven thence 
by the advance of civilization. Though he is over 
eighty years old, his limbs stiff and his strength 
failing, he is still a good shot. Finally death comes. 
Standing erect with his face toward the setting sun, 
he responds in clear voice to the summons from cloud 
and sky. Leather-Stocking, possessing all the virtues 
and none of the vices of two races, is thus the counter- 
part of Chingachgook. He is brave, truthful, honor- 
able, clean in his life, of a noble piety, and a lover of 
the forest and the chase. In his highest idealization 
he never passes the bounds of what the imagination 
grants as possible. Moreover, he is the most complete 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 155 

portrait in fiction. Since Cooper's time the novel of 
frontier life has kept pace with the progress of civiliza- 
tion westward. Sketches more realistic than his have 
been wrijbten by Bret Harte and Owen AVister; the 
Indian likewise has been poetized by others. But no 
writer, though there have been many experiments, of 
which may be cited John Gait's * Lawrie Todd ' and 
Gustave Aimard's ^ Last of the Incas/ has ever thrown 
Cooper's magic veil over the American forests and 
lakes. 

Between Smollett's ^ Eoderick Eandom ' (1748) and 
Scott's ' Pirate ' (1822), there appeared no tale of the 
sea. It is true there were in this interval many 
stories of adventure that were represented as taking 
place in part on the ocean, but they made no pretence 
to portraying the life of the sea in those respects 
wherein it differs from life on land. The rude and 
uncouth seaman and his impoverished family in an 
English port town, Jane Austen described in the per- 
fection of her art, but she knew better than to ven- 
ture on an unknown ocean. Moreover, a man who 
picks up * The Pirate ' expecting a sea story will be 
disappointed. It is a romanced account of the man- 
ners and superstitions of the Scotch and the Norse 
inhabitants of the Shetlands. The sea runs up into 
moonlit bays ; it lashes the cliffs in storm ; a vessel 
is wrecked, and one man rescued ; a whale is left by 
the tide within the bar, and gets away from the land- 
men who try to capture him; a brig is boarded by 
pirates, and a sea fight is viewed through a spy-glass. 
These scenes are all in the story that relate to the 
sea. 

As a direct challenge to the seamanship of Scott, 



156 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Cooper wrote ^The Pilot' (1824). For this work lie 
was excellently prepared, for lie had served as mid- 
shipman in the American navy. His aim was to show 
just how a ship is managed in combat, and in storm 
off a dangerous coast ; and that he did in scenes as 
thrilling as those in his Indian romances. The one 
great character of the story is the coxswain Long 
Tom Coffin, who was born on the sea, and cared for 
no land except a little mud-flat on which to grow 
vegetables. All the brutality and coarseness of sear 
men Cooper kept welLJji the background. In dis- 
tinction from ' Roderick Handom,' * The Pilot ' is the 
romance of the ocean. "^ 

Of the numerous imitations of Cooper the best 
were * Tom Cringle's Log ' and ^ The Cruise of 
the Midge,' by Michael Scott. Eugene Sue, who had 
served as surgeon in the French navy, began his lit- 
erary career with five sea tales produced in rapid 
succession, and several of his countrymen followed 
him. Germany also soon had Coopers as well as Sir 
Walter Scotts. The older form of sea adventure, 
as written by Smollett, was revived by Frederick 
Marryat, who had been a naval officer during the 
Napoleonic wars. ^ Peter Simple ' (1834), which 
has been the most popular of his stories, though 
hard pushed by 'Mr. Midshipman Easy' (1836), 
is a fair specimen of his work. It is pervaded with 
the spirit of fun for which there was no place in 
Cooper's romances, and is interspersed with yarns 
of the Baron Munchausen order. Marryat's freshest 
scenes are his pictures of life in the West Indies, as 
the negro ball to which only the elite are invited. 
His most amusing characters are Captain Kearney 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 157 

and the boatswain Chucks. The former, who can 
never tell the truth, dies with a lie on his lips, and 
leaves directions for his epitaph, which is to begin 
thus: ^Here lies Captain Kearney.' The latter, half 
gentleman and half blackguard, betrays his double 
character in his speech when giving his orders to his 
subordinates, a rhetorical device partaking almost of 
inspiration. 

Charles Kingsley placed the sea tale in an his- 
torical setting. ' Westward Ho ! ' (1855) is in some 
respects similar to Thackeray's work in ^Esmond.' 
Kingsley sought to clothe his narrative in Eliza- 
bethan prose. He affected long parenthetical sen- 
tences; used the second person singular of the verb 
in direct address, and sometimes dared to clip off the 
cVs of the past participles of weak verbs. The great- 
ness of the romance is because of its reproduction 
of the buccaneer spirit of the Elizabethan age. Most 
graphic is Kingsley's account of the stir and bustle 
when a captain is getting ready to^-^mbark for the 
west. Sir Humphrey Gilbert is about to set sail from 
Plymouth ; he has two hundred and sixty men, ship- 
wrights, masons, carpenters, and mineral men who 
know gold when they see it, and can refine it too. 
There is a goodly store, too, of musical instruments 
and morris-dancers and hobby-horses, to allure and 
charm the savages. Queen Elizabeth sends down 
her greeting to Sir Humphrey just before he weighs 
anchor, bidding him ' great good hap and safety,' and 
requesting that he send up to London his portrait just 
painted by a Plymouth artist. Sir Walter Raleigh 
bears the message from her Majesty, accompanies 
the fleet on the first day's sail, and would like 



158 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

to go farther, but does not dare, for lie has the per- 
emptory command of his queen to return with the 
portrait at once. Of the Elizabethan worthies Kings- 
ley makes live once more, Sir Richard Grenville is 
the most carefully studied; he is the high-minded 
and heroic captain of Raleigh^s ' Revenge ' : — 

Men said that he was proud, but he could not look around 
him without having something to be proud of ; that he was stern 
and harsh to his sailors, but it was only when he saw in them 
any taint of cowardice or falsehood ; that he was subject, at 
moments, to such fearful fitVtjf- rage, that he had been seen to 
snatch the glasses from the table, grind them to pieces in his 
teeth, and swallow them, but that wW only when his indigna- 
tion had been aroused by some tale of cruelty or oppression. 

5. The Renovation of Gothic Romance 

The Gothic romance, the superstitious elements of 
which had been incorporated for minor effects into 
' Waverley,' continued to exist, taking the form of the 
tale of terror, the detective story, and the fantasy, 
just as it had done before Scott. From Mrs. Radcliffe 
down to 1850, the novelists were exceedingly few who 
did not on occasion excite their readers by the strange 
and the marvellous, or frighten them by some sort 
of supernatural or bloody performance. Leigh Hunt 
wrote in 1819 : ' A man who does not contribute his 
quota of grim story nowadays, seems hardly free of 
the republic of letters. ' Shelley produced two ' terri- 
fic ' pieces, and then gave over the occupation to his 
wife. The inability to rival Mrs. Mary Shelley was 
one of the woes of Lord Byron. No better evidence 
is there of the hold Gothic machinery had on the 
imagination than the fact that it was resorted to as 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 159 

an embellislimeiit of the* political treatise. The ma- 
jestic ghost of Sir Thomas More called upon Eobert 
Southey at Keswick, and through the watches of the 
night held long conversations with him on the present 
state of society.^ What the tale of horror needed 
before it could be fully effective was a thorough over- 
hauling and a redecoration. It was too long, and it 
had not found its art. ^ 

The work of renovation began with Charles Eobert 
Maturin, in his time a well-known Irish clergyman 
and litterateur. The tale in which he displayed 
his finer imaginative power is ^Melmoth the Wan- 
derer' (1820). He eliminated from the Radcliffe ro- 
mance the * sentimental miss who luxuriates in the 
rich and weeping softness of a watery landscape,' and 
depended on fear as his sole motive. In many scenes, 
resembling the punishments in the lower circles of 
Dante's ^ Inferno,' he reached, if not terror, the border- 
land where horror becomes terror. Such is the incar- 
ceration of a young monk among serpents, whose ^ cold 
and bloating' forms crawl over him, and the starvation 
and madness of lovers in. a subterranean prison. But 
the incoherency and extreme length of the romance 
have long since overwhelmed it ; one of the last refer- 
ences to it being Thackeray's, who compared Goethe's 
eye to Melmoth's. 

Four years after the publication of ' Melmoth,' the 
presence of German romance is distinctly visible in 
English romantic fiction. It had indeed made its 
appearance previously. ^Monk' Lewis and Charles 
Brockden Brown had appropriated German material, 
and the German romanticists had exerted an influence 
1 ' Colloquies on Society,' 1829. 



160 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

on Scott. The Germans were the first to see how 
futile are three or four volumes of horror piled upon 
horror, strangulations, and shrieking statues. Lud- 
wig Tieck and Ernst Hoffmann cut their fantasies 
down to the brief tale, of from fifty to a hundred 
pages ; and Washington Irving imported the German 
tale, with a further cutting, into England and America. 
But except in fhis novelty of form, Irving's ^ Tales of 
a Traveller ' (1824) are in no way remarkable. Irving 
was too much of a common-sense realist to deal with 
superstition. His moving~^ortraits, phantom faces, 
and dancing furniture were in ^jjatention comic, and 
always carried an obvious explanation. On the other 
hand, his Addisonian taste shielded him from all 
grossness. 

Bulwer-Lytton humanized Gothic art and evoked 
its poetry. In the ^Pilgrims of the Rhine' (1834), 
he brought on the scene the swarms of English fairies 
that had been sleeping in the flowers and under the 
leaves ever since Shakespeare and Drayton had dreamed 
of them. They go on a visit to the fairies of Rhine- 
land, and there in ^ cool caverns,' talk, banter, woo, and 
marry. In ^ Zanoni ' (1842) Bulwer went deep into the 
mysteries of the Rosicrucians. According to their 
theory earth and air are filled with supernatural beings 
which preside over the destinies of man and nature. 
Those initiated into the Rosicrucian brotherhood are 
able to penetrate the veil that separates crude phenom- 
ena from this spiritual world, and to win from the 
insight the secret of eternal youth. But to preserve 
the clear vision and the freshness of youth, the in- 
itiated must keep his heart free from mortal passions. 
The process of initiation is somewhat obscure, but the 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 161 

candidate must come into the presence of an exacting 
demon and swear a ^ horrible oath/ the exact purport 
of which is kept secret from the reader. The older 
romancers — Godwin, Shelley, and then Maturin — 
made free use of Rosicrucian doctrines, laying par- 
ticular stress upon the demon. Bulwer has very little 
to say about this malignant gentleman, being more 
interested in the Eosicrucian himself^ who, in this 
instance something like five thousand years old, be- 
comes acquainted with a beautiful opera singer, marries 
her, loses his phenomena-piercing vision, and falls a 
victim to the Eeign of Terror. ^Zanoni' has been 
much read by theosophists, who see in it a foreshadow- 
ing of their doctrine of reincarnation. 

Bulwer-Lytton was in aspiration a philosopher 
fashioning Gothic material to modern purposes; 
Edgar Allan Poe has been called a born Goth. 
Whatever he touched was at once imbued with Gothic 
beauty, Gothic blood, and Gothic fear. Eastern and 
Renaissance luxuriousness he painted with the start- 
ling brilliancy of Beckford, and concealed within it 
the sting of poison and death. He writes a sea-tale, 
to depict not so much the manners of the sea, as the 
horrors of mutiny, starvation, and cannibalism. He 
writes a tale of adventure in the realistic style of 
Defoe, and the adventure is a descent into the Mael- 
strom. He describes a search for hidden treasure, 
and the guide is a madman. He constructs a finer 
detective story than was in the power of Godwin, 
Brown, or Hoffmann, but is satisfied only when he 
has made graphic those details of the crime which 
they passed over. He does not stop with the burial 
of the dead; he places you at midnight in a room 



162 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

where you hear the first faint movements of the 
cataleptic in the copper vault beneath, then the 
rending asunder of the coffin, the grating of massive 
doors; and then the emaciated figure of Lady Mad- 
eline stands before you in her shroud spotted with 
the blood of her struggles. The real power of the 
physically horrible, hints of which there were in 
Maturin, was never revealed until Poe revealed it. 
Three of his tales are the perfection of Gothic art. 
All romances of the t^^for of death are dull grays 
before the coloring of 'The Masque of the Red Death* 
(Grahcmi^s Magazine, 1842) ; thelnood of utter desola- 
tion has been nowhere else so completely expressed 
as in 'The Fall of the House of Usher* (1840), nor of 
forlornness as in ' Ligeia ' (1840). 

Within the circumscribed limits of the short story, 
Poe was a consummate artist when he chose to be. It 
was a dictum of his, in accord with a very common 
practice of Hoffmann and Irving, that no story should 
be too long to be read at one sitting. Moreover, he 
conveyed the impression that it was his custom to 
begin with the denouement, and to work backward 
just as the Chinese write their books. Whether or 
not he proceeded in just this way, there can be no 
doubt that, before writing a sentence of his finest tales, 
he knew when and how he was to end. None of the 
nineteenth-century novelists after Jane Austen, and 
none of Poe's contemporaries except Hawthorne, 
wrought with so great care. His masterpiece in 
structure is 'The Fall of the House of Usher.* It 
contains not the slightest distracting detail; the 
house, its ill-fated occupants, the dreary landscape, 
the chill autumn days, are all in unison, and the nar- 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 163 

rative, in perfect harmony with the theme, moves on 
in a solemn and magnificent march to the close, when 
the cracked walls burst asunder, and in a moment lie 
buried beneath the stagnant tarn. 

Nothing is more remarkable about Poe than his 
ability to interest permanently without an appeal to 
the moral nature. Of all his tales, not more than five 
lay any pretence whatever to this appeal, and even in 
these instances the attention is won by his melodrama 
or superb imagination. Surely no one looks to Poe for a 
probing of the conscience or for moral guidance. The 
very greatest writers have never thus laid hold of the 
supernatural or the supermortal in and for itself, but 
as a forcible means of representing excited or diseased 
states of the imagination, and their narrative, without 
being openly didactic, carries with it a moral inference. 
Corroborative of this statement, at once come to mind 
the royal ghost that haunted the palace of Elsinore, 
the blood-sprinkled hand of Lady Macbeth, and ' The 
Eime of the Ancient Mariner.' To this fact Leigh 
Hunt called the attention of Gothic romancers, and 
in these words: ^A ghost story, to be a good one, 
should unite as much as possible objects such as they 
are in life with a preternatural spirit. And to be a 
perfect one, — at least, to add to the other utility of 
excitement a moral utility.' 

To illustrate his criticism, he wrote, ^ A Tale for a 
Chimney Corner,' which possesses the ethical and 
realistic qualities he insisted upon, but none of the 
excitement. It has, however, an importance in the 
history of Gothic romance, in that it quietly ushers 
in the ideal of Hawthorne. Nearly all the Gothic 
machinery of Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Godwin 



164 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

is to be found in this Puritan : high winds, slamming 
doors, moonlight and starlight, magic and witch- 
craft, mysterious portraits, transformations, malignant 
beings, the elixir of life, the skeleton, the funeral, 
and the corpse in its shroud. To these sources 
of excitement were added, as time went on, mesmer- 
ism and clairvoyance. The novelty of Hawthorne's 
work is in his treatment. Like Shakespeare, he offers 
only a partial explanation of his unusual phenomena 
or none at all. Most unconventional is his use of 
witchcraft, as was poin^edjout by Poe, in ^ The Hol- 
low of Three Hills,' where to the imagination of the 
woman of sin, as she lays her ^ad upon the witch's 
knees beneath the magic cloak, distant scenes of sor- 
row for which she is responsible are conveyed, not by 
viewing them in a magic mirror, but by the subtle 
sense of sound. And almost equally novel is the use 
made of the fountain of youth in 'Dr. Heidegger's 
Experiment.' The persecuting demon of romance, 
when he appears in Hawthorne's pages under the 
name of Koger Chillingworth, or the Spectre of the 
Catacomb, is a personification of the mistakes, mis- 
fortunes, and sins of our past life, which will not 
out of our imagination. The transformations — Pearl 
from a capricious, elfish being into a sober woman, 
and Donatello from a thoughtless, voluptuous animal 
into a man who feels the sad weight of humanity — 
have their analogies in real life. The supernatural 
world was with Hawthorne but the inner world of 
the conscience. 

The ethical import of his narrative is always con- 
veyed by means of a fanciful symbolism. The em- 
broidered ^ that is hung about Hester Prynne's neck, 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 165 

the red stigma over Arthur Dimmesdale's heart, and 
Pearl in scarlet dress, are obviously symbolical. The 
black veil with which a Puritan minister conceals his 
face is the shadow of a dark deed. Donatello's hair- 
tipped ears are suggestions of his animalism. More- 
over, Hawthorne was inclined to interpret figuratively 
events, nature, and art. Little Pearl runs from her 
mother and cannot be coaxed to return ; that is typical 
of a moral gulf separating them. The sunless wood 
in which Hester stands alone images a moral solitude. 
Light streaming through the painted windows of a 
Gothic church is a foretaste of the ^ glories of the 
better world.' As Hawthorne views a half-finished 
bust, and sees the human face struggling to get out 
of the marble, he remarks : * As this bust in the block 
of marble, so does our individual fate exist in the 
limestone of time.' It has been said that Poe was a 
myth maker; Hawthorne likewise built up his own 
myths, and then he allegorized them like Bacon, turn- 
ing them into apologues. Even the allegorical inter- 
pretation sometimes given to 'The Marble Faun' is 
not to be ridiculed, for the allegory is there. What- 
ever may have been the origin of language, it has now 
become, in its common use, a direct representation 
of things, ideas, and feelings. Hawthorne did not 
always so treat it, but rather conceived of it as a 
system of hieroglyphics; a secret he does not call a 
secret, * it is a wild, venomous thing ' imprisoned in 
the heart. This is the way of Spenser. 

The story of Hawthorne is only half told when we 
say he refined Gothic art and fashioned it to high 
ethical purposes. As in the case of Poe, one of his 
great charms is his workmanship in structure and 



166 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

style. In the technique of the short tale, Poe was 
at least his equal ; in the longer tale, where Poe left 
many loose ends, Hawthorne succeeded twice — in 
'The Scarlet Letter' (1850) and 'The House of the ^ 
Seven Gables' (1851). Poe modelled his style on 
Defoe and De Quincey, now suggesting the one and 
now the other. Hawthorne by laborious practice 
acquired a more individual style; the good taste of 
Addison and Irving are visible in it, and the brooding 
and dreamy fancy of Tieck, disguised however in the 
fusion. "^-^ — ^ 

In literary history the precise time order of events 
is not always the precise logical order. The long 
vista of the purely Gothic romance, at whose entrance 
stands the blood-stained castle of Otranto, is closed 
by a storm and passion beaten house on the Yorkshire 
moors. The motive of Emily Bronte's 'Wuthering 
Heights ' (1847) is vengeance. Relieved of all imper- 
tinences of time and place, the situation is this: A 
man sits down and reflects : I was born in shame ; 
men have denied me education ; and they have taken 
from me the woman I loved, on the ground that I am 
unworthy of her. I am not responsible for being what 
I am; I did not preside over my birth; the demon 
within me that I tried to suppress, others loosed from 
his bands. The vengeance that the Almighty has 
allowed to sleep I myself will wake and wreak upon 
those who have wronged me, and upon their children. 
After years of appalling success in meting out the 
punishment of a Jehovah, one obstacle stands in the 
way to the consummation of the entire scheme of 
revenge. Pace to face with defeat, the will loses 
none of its tension ; the defier of gods and men starves 



NINETEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE 167 

himself into delirium and death ; his eyes that will 
not close still glare in exultation, and his lip is curled 
in a sneer, displaying sharp white teeth beneath. He 
is placed in the ground near the woman the side of 
whose coffin he had long ago in his mad grief torn 
away, that he might lie the closer to her. Beyond 
the madness and terror of ^Wuthering Heights,' 
romantic fiction has never gone. Its spiritual coun- 
terpart in real life is Emily Bronte, who preserved 
her inexorable will far into the day on which she 
died. 



CHAPTEE V 

The Realistic Eeaction 
1. The Minor Humorists and the Author of ^ PicTcwickJ 

Though Scott dominkted the world of fiction so long 
as he lived and was a directing influence for nearly two 
decades after his death, yet even during the greatest 
popularity of Waverley, there were novelists of other 
aims. Their subject was not primarily history and 
superstition, but contemporary manners, or the man- 
ners of their youth. They were not, according to pres- 
ent canons, realists, for they commonly recombined 
the matter of real life for instruction, farce, or satire ; 
and yet their efforts made for realism. To begin 
with, their product was not of the first grade, but in 
course of time Dickens came, who built his great 
romances on their tacitly assumed artistic principles. 

All along his career Scott was accompanied by 
Scotch novelists who depicted the humorous side 
of Scotch life without the historical setting or 
with only patches of it. Among them were Susan 
Ferrier, John Gait, and Dr. David Macbeth Moir. 
Miss Terrier was a friend of Scott's, and one whom 
in his latter days he liked to entertain at Abbotsford, 
as she was ^ full of humor and exceedingly ready at 
repartee.' Her three novels, ' Marriage ' (1818), ^ The 
Inheritance' (1824), and 'Destiny' (1831), conceived 

168 



THE REALISTIC REACTION 169 

in the spirit of broad comedy, have now the appear- 
ance of complementing, in the way of humor, Scott's 
romances of Scotland. Historical rarely and only in 
episodes, Miss Terrier held herself closely to contem- 
porary society. Her ideal of a novel seems to have 
been Miss Edgeworth's 'Absentee,' for her scenes 
alternate between London and the Western Highlands. 
The heroine of her first novel (and the main situa- 
tions in her other two are similar) is a spoilt, lan- 
guishing English girl of fashionable society, who is 
transported with a trio of pet dogs, 'the sweetest 
cherubs,' to a Highland castle, and compelled to live 
there for a time with a Scotch husband and his 
strange sisters and aunts. One exquisite piece of 
caricature Miss Eerrier added to fiction ; that of the 
woman who is always quoting the opinions of an 
absent friend ; in ' The Inheritance ' she appears, — 
the cool, staring, and talkative Miss Pratt, who tells 
you what her nephew Anthony Whyte says, what 
Anthony Whyte does, and what Anthony Whyte 
likes. That Anthony Whyte is one^f the redun- 
dancies of Miss Pratt's imagination. 

John Gait was a more prolific writer. The first 
novel he published, ' The Ayrshire Legatees ' {Black- 
wood^ s, 1820), put together on the plan of ' Humphry 
Clinker,' consists of a bundle of letters from an Ayr- 
shire clergyman and his family to friends at home. 
Its humor arises from a Scotchman's comments on 
London sights and amusements. ' The Annals of the 
Parish' (1821) is the novel of Gait's most written 
about by his contemporaries ; and it is surely one of 
his most characteristic and original productions. It 
is a chronicle history of an Ayrshire village minister, 



170 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Mr. Micah. Balwhidder, a kind-hearted and Quixotic 
Scotch Dr. Primrose. Charming is the quiet humor 
of Balwhidder, as he records the events of his long 
reign, sketching the characters of his three wives, and 
telling of his perplexities, and the disturbances that 
came to his parish with smuggling and its consequent 
tea-drinking, with the American war, and with the 
invasion of utilitarianism, rationalism, the meeting- 
house, and the spinning-jenny. The thread of gold 
running through ^The Annals' is the story of the 
industry and the heroisnTof Mrs. Malcolm, ^ the widow 
of a Clyde shipmaster, that w^ lost at sea with his 
vessel.' Her daughters she lived to see well married, 
and her sons well placed. Only one grief came to 
her in her resigned old age, — the loss of a son 
who died gallantly fighting the French on the sea. 
*Her morning was raw, and a sore blight fell upon 
her fortunes, but the sun looked out on her midday, 
and her evening closed loun and warm, and the stars of 
the firmament, that are the eyes of Heaven, beamed, 
as it were, with gladness when she lay down to sleep 
the sleep of rest.' Equally delightful is ^The Pro- 
vost ' ( Blackwood's Magazine, 1822), a companion- 
piece to ^The Annals.' These chronicles their author 
regarded as ' treatises on the history of society in the 
West of Scotland during the reign of George the Third.' 
More conventional in form is ^ The Entail ' (1823), a 
history of three generations of Scotch lairds. Here 
Gait went into more minute and picturesque detail on 
Scotch customs, and more deeply than elsewhere into 
the harder side of Scotch character. Though Gait is 
not of the great masters of fiction, he laid bare the 
heart of Scotland as only Burns had done. Dr. Moir 



THE REALISTIC REACTION 171 

was a friend and collaborator of Gait's. The outcome 
of the literary friendship was ' The Autobiography of 
Mansie Wauch ' (1828) ; which is an account of the life 
and adventures of an industrious and simple-minded 
tailor of Dalkeith. The humor of the piece is of that 
convivial kind to which the contemporary ^Noctes 
Ambrosianse' owed their very great popularity. Its 
truest and simplest pathos is in a sketch of Mansie's 
apprentice, who comes out of ' the howes of the Lam- 
mermoor hills/ and, yearning for the blithe scenes and 
^kent faces ' he has left behind, pines away in the village 
shop, and at length dies broken-hearted on the way to 
his ' ain hame.' Gait and Moir were the pioneers in 
what since the advent of Mr. J. M. Barrie and Mr. 
John Watson has been called kailyard fiction, though 
the happy epithet conveys a measure of depreciation 
to which every sane critic must demur. 

Older types of the novel of humor still persisted. 
The subdued comedy of Jane Austen was for a long 
time the least influential. Scott himself imitated her 
in ' St. Ronan's Well ' ; Mary Mitf ord had in mind her 
' delicious novels ' when she composed the sympathetic 
sketches entitled ^ Our Village ' (1824-32), and traces 
of Jane Austen are in Harriet Martineau's ' Five Years 
of Youth, or Sense and Sentiment' (1831). ^North- 
anger Abbey ' was one of a group of anti-romances, of 
which another clever specimen was E. S. Barrett's 
^ Adventures of Cherubina ' (1813). Thomas Love Pea- 
cock, in ^ Nightmare Abbey ' (1818), and ^ Crotchet 
Castle' (1831), extended burlesque to all forms of 
contemporary romance, whether in verse or prose, 
taking as a text, ^The Devil has come among us.' 
The Oriental tale became again one of the fashions; 



172 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

but reverted to what it was before Beckford. In 
it as now written, a Gil Bias was put through a series 
of laughable adventures in the East; or, somewhat 
after the manner of Goldsmith's ^ Citizen of the 
World,' the Persian ambassador with his retinue 
invaded England. The funniest of the Oriental 
tales were James Morier's ^Hajji Baba of Ispa- 
han' (1823) and ^ Hajji Baba in England' (1828). 
Maria Edgeworth lived till 1849, and continued to 
publish ; her ^ Ormond ' (1817) being nearly as good 
an Irish tale as ' Th^"-:A^sentee.' The humor and 
pathos of the Irishman at home she made an inex- 
haustible source of delight. Miss Sydney Owenson 
(Lady Morgan), who was much under the influence 
of Madame de Stael, wrote in hysterics of the O'Don- 
nels, the O'Briens, and the O'Flaherties ; while the 
Irish novel preserved its steadier tone in the sketches 
of the Banim brothers (John and Michael), and Will- 
iam Carleton. Indeed, the severest realism of the 
period is to be found in Carleton's ^ Hedge School' 
and ^ Poor Scholar,' of the collection known as ^ Traits 
and Stories of the Irish Peasantry.' Samuel Lover 
in 'Handy Andy' (1842) wrote the broad comedy 
of Irish life ; and Charles Lever caricatured the Irish 
dragoon. 

Outside the Irish story, Maria Edgeworth was a 
force of considerable magnitude. Her ' Belinda ' and 
Frances Burney's 'Cecilia' were the earlier types 
of two extraordinary pieces of literary abandon by 
Benjamin Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton. The former's 
' Vivian Grey ' (first part, 1826) was written to startle 
by its brilliant and unrestrained cynicism. Vivian is 
a smart stripling of no real attainments, who tries 



THE REALISTIC REACTION 173 

the experiment of rising in the world by playing the 
part of an intellectual Don Juan. If a young lord 
has just published a poem, he will tell him that 
Goethe has reviewed it in the last number of The 
Weimar Literary Gazette, and add, ^ It is really de- 
lightful to see the oldest poet of Europe dilating on 
the brilliancy of a new star on the poetic horizon/ 
If a sentimental miss is collecting autographs, he will 
give her offhand Washington Irving's, and then ask : 
' Shall I write any more ? One of Sir Walter's, or 
Mr. Southey's, or Mr. Milman's or Mr. Disraeli's ? or 
shall I sprawl a Byron ? ' If she encourages his 
addresses, he will fascinate and frighten her by prov- 
ing what an admirable plan it would be for all younger 
brothers (he is a younger brother) to sell themselves 
to the devil ; and in a jugglery with words for which 
she is unprepared, he will bring her to the point of 
proposing to him, just as she is called from the 
veranda. By his coolness, impudence, and flattery, 
Vivian pushes his way into society, invited or unin- 
vited, and becomes the agent of a j^olitical coalition 
which seems about to oust the ministry, when his in- 
tellectual legerdemain is exposed, and the impostor 
makes his exit to the Continent. Bulwer's pyro- 
technic display in ' Pelham ' (1828) is no less dazzling. 
The hero is in his externals a new ideal of a gentle- 
man. At a time when the fop let his hair fall in 
ringlets to his shoulders, covered his shirt-front with 
a galaxy of studs, and threw a heavy chain around 
his neck ; and browns, greens, and blues were the 
fashion in coats, — Pelham casts aside his jewellery, 
brushes out his curls, puts on black waistcoat and 
black trousers, and steps into a Cheltenham drawing- 



174 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

room, to be stared at, to mystify, and astound by his 
reckless talk, and to commit, without the least danger 
of discovery, the delightful blunder of speaking of 
Hesiod as an imitator of Shenstone. Entering poli- 
tics, Pelham has a hand in driving out the Tories and 
in bringing in the Whigs, but through the ingratitude 
of the new Premier, whom he has brilliantly served, 
he misses what he was aiming at — a seat in Parliament.^ 
The novel of high life that thus skimmed the sur- 
face of things fell into the hands of women, and 
degenerated into trash and rhapsody. The number 
of these fashionable fic^ons that poured from the 
press during the thirties and ^nimediately thereafter, 
I do not dare estimate. To Carlyle they appeared as 
' shiploads.' The best of the class are the one hundred 
or more novels and tales written by Mrs. Catherine 
Gore between 1824 and 1862. About many of them 
that have come in my way is an air of profound 
learning. Not infrequently three languages are rep- 
resented in a motto standing at the head of a chapter ; 
while the language within is a mixture of aristocratic 
English and stock French phrases. Mrs. Gore's sub- 
ject was commonly club life, ennui, fribbledom, and 
the political questions of the hour. The writer who 
had rejuvenated this kind of fiction, and given it a 
political bias, transformed it. Disraeli's ^ Coningsby ' 
(1844) is a remarkable piece of plausible reasoning. 
In it, the relations of Church and State, parliamentary 

^ 'There is "Pelham," it is true, which the writer of these 
lines has seen a Jewess reading in the Steppe of Debreczin, and 
which a young Prussian baron, a great traveller, whom he met 
at Constantinople in '44, told him he always carried in his 
valise.' — Geo. Borrow^ Appendix to 'Romany Rye.' 



THE REALISTIC KEACTION 175 

abuses, the failure of utilitarianism, the part a popular 
press should play as an educating force, and ways of 
invigorating a weakened royalty and a weakened aris- 
tocracy, were all shrewdly canvassed by a wise and 
magnanimous Hebrew; and a new programme was 
announced as a guide to the Young English party, 
of which Disraeli was the head. With this publica- 
tion, the political novel which had grown out of the 
older fashionable tale was established and came 
into vogue. 

Between 1820 and 1840, society had its jester 
in Theodore Hook. He is the Mr. Gay of Dis- 
raeli's ^Coningsby,' who is invited to dinner parties 
for his stories that make the guests hold their sides 
and roll under the table, and the Mr. Wagg of 
^ Pendennis,' who goes about among '■ the fashionables 
and eccentrics,' and then cuts them up in his effusions. 
These personalities, which run all through ^Sayings 
and Doings ' (1824-30), and gave them a high flavor 
to his contemporaries, are now fast growing indis- 
tinct ; and Hook appears as a trafficker^ hoaxes and 
word-plays. Of ^Sayings and Doings,' 'Gervase 
Skinner ' may be read as an example of Hook's 
manner. Skinner is ^ a skinflint on principle,' who by 
mistake is imprisoned in a lunatic asylum, * clipped, 
washed, and waistcoated,' and at length mulcted of 
£2000, and an annuity of £150, by Mrs. Fuggleston 
— an adventuress of the stage — and her jealous 
husband. A scene especially noteworthy for what 
Dickens afterward made out of it is the one where 
Mrs. Fuggleston, ^uttering a piercing shriek,' falls 
senseless into Skinner's arms, and is discovered lying 
there. And a wholly new character is the loquacious 



176 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

gentleman whose thought jumps the ruts of the con- 
ventional sentence. He first appeared in ^Gervase 
Skinner' as the stage-manager Kekewich, and after- 
ward in ^ Gilbert Gurney ' and ' Jack Brag.' Kekewich 
is becoming enthusiastic over Mrs. Fuggleston, the 
actress : — 

' Wonderful woman, sir ! ' said Kekewich ; ' full of talent as 
an egg's full of meat — husband a stick — must have him — 
part of her articles — pity she married — fine creature, depend 
upon it — plays Ophelia in high style — finds her own dresses, 
silk stockings, and all — symmetrical figure, sweet temper, and 
coal-black hair, down to 'the-~6mall of her back — great hit for 
me — short life and a merry one — snapped up for the London 
houses — manager sent down a doctor of divinity and two physi- 
cians to see her at Leek — nabbed her — snapped her up like a 
lamb from my flock,' etc. 

There was a time when everybody, from King 
George the Fourth down to the boys on the streets of 
London and New York, knew by heart the phrases 
of Pierce Egan. The production that gave him this 
popularity, extending from the highest to the lowest, 
was ^ Life in London ; or. The Day and Night Scenes 
of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. And His Elegant Friend, 
Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, The 
Oxonian, In Their Rambles and Sprees through the 
Metropolis.' The work appeared in monthly shilling 
numbers, beginning with July, 1821, and was illus- 
trated by Cruikshank when at his very best. Three 
observations should be made on this novel. It is one 
of the very earliest examples of a series of sketches 
published in monthly parts; which was afterward 
the usual method of Dickens and Thackeray. Second, 
it introduces into fiction the cockneys, their haunts 



THE REALISTIC REACTION 177 

and their speech. The cockney called his watch 
ticker, tattler, or thimble; his spectacles, /oitj'-e^/es, bar- 
nacles, or green specs; his brain, upper-story ; his hat, 
tile, cojstor, or uppercrust; his umbrella, spread, summer- 
cabbage, or ivater-plant ; and in his pronunciation in- 
terchanged the sounds of v and w. The humorous 
chronicler of his slang italicized or capitalized it, that 
it might not escape the most rapid of readers. There 
were also word-plays, palpable and obscure, from 
which a Shakespeare might have learned something ; 
and that they might be grasped by the weakest of 
intellect, they, too, were made to stand out boldly in 
italics and capitals. Third, ^Tom and Jerry' is a 
picture-novel, a joint production of author and artist. 
The reader of it is uncertain whether the drawings 
are there to illustrate the text, or the text is there to 
explain the drawings. The novel was at once drama- 
tized for London and New York ; and many imitations 
followed, in which the scenes were sometimes in 
London and sometimes transferred to Paris. It was 
concluded by Egan himself in 1828, uiider the title, 
' Finish to The Adventures of Tom, Jerry, and Logic 
in their Pursuits through Life in and out of London.' 
The gay adventuress of the first part commits suicide ; 
Bob Logic dies in wretchedness; Corinthian Tom 
breaks his neck in a steeplechase ; Jerry, now reform- 
ing, retires to the country for good, where he marries 
Miss Eosebud, and becomes a highly respected justice 
of the peace. 

It was at this juncture, while the humorists were 
experimenting here and there, with burlesque, carica- 
ture, and cockney, that the young Charles Dickens 
published the first instalment of ' The Pickwick 



178 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Papers/ a little pamphlet of twenty-six pages of text, 
in pale green wrappers. The first number was issued 
in April, 1836 ; the twentieth and last in November, 
1837. At first, Dickens wrote his text as the 
letterpress to Robert Seymour's ^cockney sporting 
plates,' evidently having in mind something like ' Tom 
and Jerry.' Seymour dying after the publication of 
the first number, Dickens changed his plan greatly, 
subordinating for the future the illustrations to the 
letterpress. Such in Iqriei was the origin of ^Pick- 
wick.' It soon becanie~l;he topic of conversation 
among all classes, who laugh^cj over its unexpected 
situations, and word-plays such as, ^Mr. Pickwick 
proceeded to put himself into his clothes, and his 
clothes into his portmanteau'; its phrases entered 
popular speech, where some of them, as 4n a Pick- 
wickian sense,' still remain ; in the course of time it 
found its way into nearly every European language ; 
and historically considered, its publication was a turn- 
ing-point in the course of English fiction. 

' Pickwick ' was not so well received by the critics, 
who saw in it imitations of contemporary humorists. 
There were indeed some echoes. Mr. Samuel Pick- 
wick was in a way anticipated by ' the fat knight ' in 
* Tom and Jerry,' and at least hints for Wardle and the 
Dingley Dell adventures were naturally found in the 
country scenes at Squire Hawthorn's. Oddly enough, 
too, in view of the usual explanation for the name of 
Dickens's hero, the word Pickwick as the name of a 
place occurs in Egan. Hook certainly furnished 
Dickens with several minor incidents, situations, and 
one character. The misadventures of Pickwick have 
their analogues in the career of Skinflint. Particularly 



THE REALISTIC REACTION 179 

close is the resemblance between Skinflint's being 
found with Mrs. Fuggleston in his arms, and Mrs. 
Bardell flinging herself into Pickwick's, ^ with a cata- 
ract of tears and a chorus of sobs.' Kekewich is the 
first edition of Mr. Alfred Jingle. This process of 
pointing out the sources of Dickens might be carried 
much farther, were anything to be gained by it, back to 
Smollett and Addison. But all that is worth insist- 
ing upon is that in Hook, Egan, and their brother 
humorists is the literary background to 'Pickwick.' 
Just as Scott had taken the Gothic and historical 
romance, impossible and insane, and made of it 'Wa- 
verley ' ; so Dickens, working in the novel of farcical 
situation, transformed it, making of it a distinct 
species. The minor humorists were weak in what the 
rhetoricians call invention. They worked again and 
again the same situations ; of characters in any full 
sense of the term, they had few; and when they 
touched low life, their imagination deserting them, 
they presented it in its crass vulgarity\_ Dickens pos- 
sessed immense creative power. ' Pickwick,' contain- 
ing some sixty distinct situations and more than three 
hundred and fifty characters, is of all English novels 
the one of largest scope. Though these characters are 
mostly the humors of comedy, they are not merely 
such. Sam Weller is the embodiment of all that is 
delightful in the London cockney. Dickens wrote 
with the mind's eye upon the customs and manners, 
the men and women of his time, which his imagina- 
tion, seizing hold of, lifted into the world of the gro- 
tesque. This has been the home of the very greatest 
humorists — the creators of Don Quixote, Falstaff, 
and Uncle Toby. In full sympathy with his material, 



180 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

as one who knew London and the hardships of its 
slums and prisons, he invested his narrative, be it 
farce or comedy, with a tragic cast and a noble 
humanity. 

2. Charles Dickens and the Humanitarian Novel 

The humanitarian novel, with which the name of 
Dickens is preeminently associated after the publica- 
tion of ^ Pickwick,' is the popular section of an ex- 
tensive humanitarian literature, and as such it is the 
most available record of a deepjind far-reaching phil- 
anthropic movement, which had its beginnings in the 
eighteenth century, and rose to its sentimental culmi- 
nation some fifty years ago. When the nineteenth 
century opened, the English penal code, to speak most 
respectfully of it, was a brutal anomaly. Statutes of 
the Plantagenets and the Tudors, ludicrous for their 
tragic severity, were still nominally in full force. 
During the reigns of the Georges, the number of capi- 
tal offences increased in steady march from sixty-six 
to above two hundred. The readiness of the minis- 
try to create at any time a felony without benefit of 
clergy, was one of the grim jests of Burke. Among 
the acts punishable by death were pocket-picking and 
shoplifting, in each case to the amount of five shil- 
lings. The moral and sanitary condition of British 
prisons was, to use the lone adjective of a Parliamen- 
tary report, ' dreadful.' While the Gothic romancers 
were horrifying the public by detailed accounts of re- 
fractory nuns incarcerated in vaults for the dead, the 
real tombs, where real men and women were being 
buried alive, were the Marshalsea and Newgate; of 



THE REALISTIC REACTION 181 

which and other jails and prisons one may read in 
the Dantesque descriptions of John Howard. With 
the invention of the power-loom arose new social 
problems. Workmen in factories were paid barely 
enough to afford mere subsistence in barns or in 
cellars; and in the train of evils came the employ- 
ment of women and children through long days, in 
some cases from five in the morning until seven in 
the evening. Workmen united, and Parliament sup- 
pressed the trade unions. They rose in riot in conse- 
quence of famine and the high price of food products, 
resulting as they thought from a new corn law ; the 
response of the government was a suspension of the 
habeas corpus act, and the passage of laws practically 
prohibiting public meetings for considering grievances. 

Philanthropists in and out of Parliament had for a 
long time been doing what they could for the ameliora- 
tion of the lower and criminal classes ; and in the sec- 
ond quarter of the nineteenth century their endeavors 
were in large measure successful. J'oundling hospi- 
tals had long been established, and societies for taking 
distressed boys out of the street and educating them. 
Laws were passed restricting the la})or of women and 
children. The slave-trade, and afterward slavery, was 
abolished. Prisons were becoming penitentiaries, and 
the penal code was reformed. The elective franchise 
was enlarged. Corn laws were repealed. Parliament 
appropriated money for public education, and standard 
literature was published in cheap form. The list of 
philanthropists and reformers is long and glorious, 
Wilberforce, Pomilly, Mackintosh, Brougham, Peel, 
Lord Ashley, Cobden, and Bright. 

The humanitarian movement gave us the humanita- 



182 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

rian novel, and in turn the novel probably accelerated 
the movement. Philanthropic motive was not absent 
from our earliest eighteenth-century fiction. It ap- 
peared in Defoe, Fielding, and Goldsmith, combined 
with the picaresque escapade ; and in Mackenzie, com- 
bined with a plaintive sentimentalism. It was a more 
conscious aim of the pedagogic and the revolutionary 
novelists, the popularizers of social theories. There 
are pages in Godwin's ^Fleetwood' which a reader 
cannot fail to remember: for example, the account 
of the dreary and despair ingTrife of young children in 
the silk factories of Lyons. But^the Godwin novel of 
theory, with its humanitarian tendencies, received a 
check from Scott. Scott brushed aside in jest all 
social and philanthropic schemes, having no faith in 
them ; and consequently his romances are free of 
them. He represents the conservative recoil from 
the French Revolution and its philosophies, and he 
carried with him the world of fiction. It was not 
until he was dying at Abbotsford that the philan- 
thropists showed any marked disposition to take pos- 
session of the novel. An approximate date of this 
appropriation is the publication of ' Paul Clifford ' 
(1830), in which Bulwer-Lytton elaborated the thesis, 
that 'a, vicious prison discipline and a sanguinary 
criminal code ' do not prevent crime at all, but really 
help to turn out criminals. The truth of his conten- 
tion was fully corroborated by the investigation of 
Parliament five years later. 

In Bentley^s Magazine for January, 1837, Dickens 
began the publication of ' Oliver Twist,' which, though 
differing in details and somewhat in aim from ' Paul 
Clifford,' is built on similar lines. It is a picaresque 



THE REALISTIC REACTION 183 

story humanized, and given a realistic setting in the 
London slums. After the publication of the two im- 
mediately succeeding novels of adventure — ^Nicholas 
Nickleby ^ and ^ Old Curiosity Shop ' — Dickens became 
a sort of professor of humanitarianism ; and he held 
his position for nearly thirty years, disturbed now 
and then by a critic or reviewer who questioned his 
knowledge. The light of that knowledge, which was 
indeed somewhat false and misleading, and the light 
of an imagination of strange and alluring splendor, 
he turned upon a great variety of English scene and 
character, but especially upon workhouses, debtors' 
prisons, pawnbrokers' shops, hovels of the poor, law 
offices, dark streets and dark alleys, all the London 
haunts and lurking-places of vice, crime, and pain. 
His theme was always the downtrodden and the op- 
pressed. He was their advocate ; for them each of 
his novels after ' Pickwick ' is a lawyer's brief. He 
did not believe it possible for the lower and criminal 
classes to raise themselves by th^-elective franchise 
to a higher moral and intellectual plane. To him 
Parliament was the dreariest place in the world, and 
he kept out of it. He sought to arouse the conscience 
of the British public, and he left the issue with them- 
selves. He accordingly attended, often acting as chair- 
man, meetings of philanthropic societies, where gov- 
ernmental abuses and the condition of criminals and 
the poor were to be canvassed, visited jails and pris- 
ons, holding long conversations with the keepers, and 
went on addressing the ever increasing audience of 
his novels. Through him spoke the heart and con- 
science of Britain, which had found no responsive 
voice in Scott. 



184 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Though the novels of Dickens have their raison 
d^^tre in this quickening of the social sympathies, 
it will not do to insist upon faithfulness to truth in 
details ; we must grant him greater freedom in dealing 
with facts than we are called upon to grant to any- 
other modern humorist of the first order ; greater free- 
dom, it is often maintained, than art can reasonably 
expect. Satire — and the Dickens novel is always sa- 
tirical, running the entire scale from light burlesque 
to fierce invective — satire J^ likely to be misplaced 
so soon as it becomes a profession. The attacks of 
Dickens on science and political ee0,nomy are hysteri- 
cal curiosities. Of all the abuses lashed or burlesqued 
in his novels, none later than those in ' Oliver Twist ' 
were in the strictest sense real. The rest of his novels 
that purport to deal wholly or in part with contempo- 
rary vices, are really historical, representing, so far a^ 
they are true to fact, England of the Fourth George 
rather than England of Victoria. They are com- 
pletely oblivious of what was done in the first twenty 
years of Victoria, in educating the mass of the Eng- 
lish people, in reforming prison discipline, in lessen- 
ing the law's delay, and in regulating the hours of 
labor. As Walter Bagehot pointed out to Dickens in 
1858, there must be a government routine ; there must 
be formal proceedings for courts of law ; there must 
be disagreeable and irritating confinement for crimi- 
nals. Hardship and injustice in individual cases have 
always accompanied the most careful and merciful 
administration of law. In spite of all precautions, a 
cruel schoolmaster will get himself enthroned some- 
where; and there is no way of preventing a hard- 
hearted gentleman who has the necessary capital, from 



THE REALISTIC REACTION 185 

building a cotton mill and operating it, or of prevent- 
ing a sleek villain from reading law and opening an 
office. But when Dickens liad thus discovered some 
persisting imperfection of the social state, it became 
for him the germ of a structure as delightfully fantastic 
as a tale from the ' Arabian Nights.' For example, he 
has made up his mind to satirize the delays in the 
Court of Chancery. To this end he describes London 
in the grasp of November fog and rain, and then passes 
in easy transition to Lincoln's Inn Hall, where sits the 
Lord High Chancellor, with a foggy glory around his 
head, listening to lawyers who, like the men and 
women in the muddy streets, are tripping one another 
up — on slippery precedents. The object of govern- 
ment should be to despatch business. Dickens imag- 
ines a ' red-tape ' establishment whose maxim is ^ how 
not to do it,' and proceeds to construct his Circumlocu- 
tion Office. The workhouses are notoriously misman- 
aged ; and, for the purpose of ridiculing them, Dickens 
represents the overseers of the poor as seriously con- 
tracting ^ with the waterworks to lay on an unlimited 
supply of water, and with a corn factor to supply 
periodically small quantities of oatmeal.' And when 
he has once hit upon his fancy, he logically completes 
it down to the shrinking bodies of the paupers and the 
coffins ever becoming narrower and shallower. Accept 
the premises of Dickens, and every detail follows. 

The immense audience of Dickens in England and 
America certainly did not stop to question him, though 
in course of time they had some misgivings. At first 
they were spellbound by the humor of ^ Pickwick ' ; 
then, with the publication of 'Old Curiosity Shop,' 
their hearts were touched by the illness and death of 



186 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

little children. The outcasts in Bret Harte's roaring 
camps dropped their cards to listen to the tale of Nell; 
Landor thought that ' upon her, Juliet might for a 
moment have turned her eyes from Romeo ' ; and Poe 
wrote of ^ Old Curiosity Shop ' : ^ These concluding 
scenes are so drawn that human language, urged by 
human thought, could go no farther in the excitement 
of human feelings.' The effect of Dickens's pathos has, 
during the lapse of a half-century, undergone change ; 
it seems to be of a fancif^ilworld far removed from 
the actual. It no longer moves to tears, but awakens 
lather a pleasing aesthetic emotion, because of its 
poetic qualities, most completely manifest in the 
marvellous description of Paul Dombey's death. Of 
this pathos, so far as it has a literary source, Sterne 
is the father. The wanderings of Nell, holding the 
hand of her aged grandfather, along the lanes, through 
graveyards and villages, is the story of poor Maria 
with fresh details. There would seem to be a priori 
no reason why we should not accept in literature 
fanciful pathos as well as fanciful humor, but in the 
long run we do not ; possibly because there is sufficient 
pathos in life as it is. The time comes when both 
the public and the critic express their want of sym- 
pathy with all premeditated emotion by calling it 
sentimentalism. 

Against the current offhand condemnation of Dick- 
ens's sentimentalism history, however, will surely 
protest. It belongs to his time, having appeared, for 
example, in Bulwer's ^Eugene Aram' (1832), several 
years before Dickens had thought even of ' Pickwick.' 
When literature, under the influence of a changing 
public sentiment, begins its swing from romance or a 



THE REALISTIC REACTION 187 

coldly picturesque treatment of life to depicting the 
heart and the affections, it does not stop till it reaches 
sentimentalism. From reason as the guide, to the 
heart as the guide, the rebound is sudden. It was so 
in the eighteenth century ; it was so in the nineteenth 
century. Dickens and Richardson are exact parallels. 
Moreover, as in the case of Richardson, the elemental 
feelings underlie the pathos of Dickens. There is 
nothing in life more fundamentally pathetic than the 
death of children. One generation demands that the 
scene be related briefly; another that the novelist 
linger over it in sentences cadenced and alliterative. 
That is the main difference. 

On its personal side the sentimentalism of Dickens 
is a phase of his idealism. The terms romanticism 
and idealism have come to be, to an extent, synony- 
mous, for the reason that a romancer is likely to be an 
idealist, and conversely, an idealist is likely to be a 
romancer. The English romantic movement began, so 
far as the novel is implicated in it, ia^a renaissance of 
feeling ; it passed through a phase of adventure, and 
in Dickens it reverted to a literature of feeling. Scott 
is our type of romanticist in highest feather. His 
prime characteristic is a spirit of adventure, historical 
and imaginary. But in the mind of the idealist there 
may be no bias toward adventure. The inner life, first 
of all, he seeks to embody in his art, and with a direct 
or an implied moral purpose. His theme is the worth 
of our thoughts, imaginings, affections, and religious 
instincts; the need of a trust in our fellow-men, a 
faith in the final outcome of human endeavor, and a 
belief in immortality. He is a conservative defending 
the ways of Providence. Certain aspects of this ideal- 



188 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

ism were not absent from Scott — honor, fidelity, cour- 
age, magnanimity. These virtues, however, are in 
Scott's romances not so much in and for themselves, 
as for majestic effect. The distinction between 
romance and idealism may be best comprehended 
by bringing into mental juxtaposition any one 
of Scott's historical novels and 'The Tale of Two 
Cities.' Both will be found to be grandly picturesque ; 
the parallel extends no farther. The inner life de- 
picted in Scott is cold, ^iventional, and illogical; 
Dickens preaches a sermon on the sublime text, 
' Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay 
down his life for his friends.' 

Dickens thus restored to the novel the idealism 
which departed with Eichardson and Fielding. 
For all the squalor, sin, and pain in the novels 
of Dickens, the impression left on reading any one 
of them is, that he believed as implicitly as Leibnitz 
that this is the best of all possible worlds. This is 
a proposition which metaphysicians have found rather 
diffi-cult of proof, and it may be as far from the 
truth of the matter as arrant pessimism. But that 
Dickens should have held to such a faith, after pass- 
ing through the degradation and the disappointments 
of his early life, and that he should have expressed it 
in literature, is most inspiring. His faith in the bet- 
ter element of human nature, in its possible triumph, 
in its readiness to grasp the helping hand outstretched 
to it, was boundless. His novels are a tribute to the 
human species, to the vast army of beings who live 
and struggle for a period, and then fall unremembered 
to give place to others. Eead 'Paul Clifford' and 
* Oliver Twist,' and note the difference between these 



THE REALISTIC REACTION 189 

two picaresque fictions. Paul becomes a highway- 
man; Oliver emerges from the den of Fagin un- 
contaminated. Eead, too, 'Candide' and ^Martin 
Chuzzlewit/ and likewise note the difference be- 
tween these two novels, each of which deals in its 
own way with the famous hypothesis of Leibnitz. 
The cynicism of Voltaire is brilliant and telling ; but 
it is Mark Tapley that we like to follow, as he 
wanders over the earth seeking to relieve distress, 
that he may have some occasion to be ^ jolly.' In 
Mark Tapley is Dickens's philosophy of life reduced 
to its lowest terms. 

A most delightful manifestation of the idealism of 
Dickens is his humor. None of the novels after 
' Pickwick ' was conceived so completely in the spirit 
of farce as was that ; and Sam Weller one can hardly 
think of as being surpassed. But on the whole the 
humor of Dickens broadened and deepened in the im- 
mediately succeeding novels, especially in certain 
sections of *01d Curiosity Shop ' and -'Martin Chuzzle- 
wit/ where humor was united with pathos in a sort of 
tragi-comedy. Mr. Eichard Swiveller, who, after be- 
ing ' staggered ' for years, fell in with the small ser- 
vant, dubbed her the Marchioness, and taught her to 
play cribbage and drink hot purl, is the Don Quixote 
of blackguards. The disreputable workhouse nurse, 
Sairey Gamp, moving about the stage haunted by the 
imaginary Mrs. Harris, is Dickens's supreme achieve- 
ment in humor. In ' David Copperfield,' where in the 
Peggotty and Barkis episodes farce is held in some 
restraint, Dickens wrote pure comedy. 

Wherever there is humor and satire, there is, if not 
reality itself, a sense of reality ; there must be events 



190 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

and characters that touch the real at some points. 
The men in whom no humor is found are the out- 
and-out romancers and the out-and-out naturalists. 
The region where humor dwells is somewhere between 
the real and the ideal ; in an imaginative treatment of 
real life. The realistic reaction against Scott was 
initiated by the minor humorists, and the culmination 
of that purely humorous literature was ^Pickwick.' 
In the way of burlesque of romance, Dickens carried 
the reaction farther. la-Jbhe opening chapter of 
^ Martin Chuzzlewit/ he ridicules ' leather-jerkined 
soldiers * and ^ the enormous amount of bravery, wis- 
dom, eloquence, virtue, gentle birth, and true nobility, 
that appears to have come into England with the Nor- 
man Invasion.' ^Oliver Twist' is a protest, in the 
name of ^ stern and plain truth,' against the unreal 
housebreakers and highwaymen of Harrison Ains- 
worth : — 

Here — in ' Oliver Twist ' — are no canterings upon moonlit 
heaths, no merry-makings in the snuggest of all possible cav- 
erns, none of the attractions of dress, no embroidery, no lace, 
no jack-boots, no crimson coats and ruffles, none of the dash 
and freedom with which ' the road ' has been, time out of mind, 
invested. The cold, wet, shelterless midnight streets of Lon- 
don ; the foul and frowsy dens, where vice is closely packed 
and lacks the room to turn ; the haunts of hunger and disease, 
the shabby rags that scarcely hold together : where are the at- 
tractions of these things ? 

In these and other novels of Dickens, the door to 
realism is opening. Dickens, however, was not greatly 
inclined to remonstrate with his contemporaries, and his 
realism in the main came about naturally, as he fol- 
lowed the bent given his talent by his early life and 



THE REALISTIC REACTION 191 

reading. He began Ms literary career as a reporter. 
His short ' Sketches by Boz ' have the air of the 
eighteenth-century quiet observer and newswriter. 
He talks to apprentices, loiters about hackney-coach 
stands, visits the circus and pleasure gardens, explores 
Newgate, where he converses with the murderer to be 
hanged in the morning, and is a spectator at the exe- 
cution ; he elbows his way along crowded thorough- 
fares, gets a glimpse at a shabby wretch, whom he 
follows through alleys to a cheap boarding-house or a 
gin-shop, and then he writes up what he has seen. 
The same reportorial air is about his long novels, 
which are groups of incidents. The main difference 
is that, while in his sketches he writes down his ob- 
servations fresh from experience, in his novels he 
draws upon his memory. The former came nearer the 
literal impress of real life, without, however, quite 
reaching it ; the latter have a greater infusion of im- 
agination. No one who has not examined the 
matter can have the faintest conception of the very 
large body of personal experiences underlying the 
novels of Dickens, not only ' David Copperfield,' but 
even ^ Hard Times,' where you would least expect to 
find them. In this richness of descriptive detail, 
based upon what Dickens had actually seen, is one 
aspect of his realism. 

As in the treatment of fact, so in character-building, 
the essence of Dickens's art is grotesque exaggeration. 
Like Smollett, he was on the lookout for some oddity 
which for his purpose he made more odd than it was. 
But he had a way of observing the very oddity that 
marks some quality of mind, often a peculiarity of an 
occupation or a profession. To Sam Weller all men 



192 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

are boots ; every movement and word of Seth Peck- 
sniff betrays bis hypocrisy ; Micawber is the incarna- 
tion of impecuniosity; and Mrs. Gamp of the lie so 
often repeated that it passes for truth. W^hat he 
meant by his characters it was a habit of Dickens to 
indicate by the names he gave them ; as Lord Mutanhed, 
the Artful Dodger, the Barnacles, and Mr. Hamilton 
Veneering. They are, all of them, humors highly 
idealized, and yet retaining so much of the real that 
we recognize in them sojne^ disposition of ourselves 
and of the men and women we meet. The number of 
these humorous types that Dic'kens added to fiction 
runs into the thousands ; it is by far the largest single 
contribution that has ever been made. 

Dickens was from the very first a check to medise- 
valism. After he began writing, knights and ladies 
and tournaments became rarer. He awakened the 
interest of the public in the social condition of Eng- 
land after the Napoleonic wars. The Scott novel had 
come swollen with prefaces, notes, and appendixes, to 
show that it was true to the spirit of history; the 
Dickens novel came considerably enlarged with per- 
sonal experiences, anecdotes, stories from friends, and 
statistics, to show that it was founded upon facts. 
Instead of the pageant of the Middle Age, we now 
have, in the novels of those who have learned their 
art from Dickens, strikes and riots, factories and 
granaries and barns in blaze, employee shooting 
employer, underground tenements, sewing-garrets, 
sweating-establishments, workhouses, truck-stores, 
the ravages of typhus, enthusiastic descriptions of 
model factories, model prisons, model cottages, dis- 
cussions of the new poor law, of trade unions, of 



THE REALISTIC REACTION 193 

Chartism, and of the relations of the rich and the poor. 
The new characters are operatives in factories, agri- 
cultural laborers, miners, tailors, seamstresses, and 
paupers. Patience, longsuffering, gentleness, in stal- 
wart or angelic form, is oppressed by viragoes, tall 
and bearded and of flashing eyes, or by gentlemen of 
bloated red faces. Dickens never advocated in his 
novels any specific means of reform. The novel is 
now stated as a problem, which the a.uthor solves, or 
indicates the way to the solution. Disraeli set the 
example of this broader social treatise in his ' Sybil ' 
(1845), the subject of which is the condition of labor 
in the years immediately following the first Chartist 
riots. One sentence of his, in which he condensed his 
appreciation of the Liberal party, is memorable : ^ The 
great measures of Sir Robert Peel, which produced 
three good harvests, have entirely revived trade.' 

The year 1848 was for England, as for the rest of 
Europe, a time of alarm. In that year workmen from 
all parts of England congregated inTjondon in very 
great numbers, and presented to Parliament a mam- 
moth petition, in which they made known their de- 
mands. In every nook and corner of the metropolis 
Wellington had his soldiers in hiding. The workmen 
for the time were cowed ; but whether they were re- 
maining quiet, waiting for an opportune moment for 
attack, or had given over their projects in despair, 
was uncertain. Some saw in the immediate future 
only anarchy; others an approaching millennium of 
peace, fraternity, and good-will. Charles Kingsley, 
from his country parsonage at Eversley, was looking 
toward London with a heart palpitating with interest, 
wonder, and alternating hopes and fears. He was 



194 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Tip in tlie morning at five o'clock, writing first ' Yeast ' 
and then ^ Alton Locke ' before the heavy parish duties 
of the day. These two social sermons are red-hot in- 
gots, hissing with passion and indignation. Kingsley 
believed that labor had great grievances, and he laid 
them bare. He also pointed out the moral mistakes of 
workmen, dwelling particularly on their atheism and 
unbelief ; he stated what seemed to him to be the real 
attitude of the upper classes toward the downtrod- 
den, and finally announc^dr-h^is programme for bring- 
ing about harmony and contentment. The Church of 
England was, in his view, the only mediator between 
employer and employee. And by the Church of Eng- 
land he was careful to make plain that he did not 
mean the existing aristocratic church looking Rome- 
wards, but a reformed church, liberal enough to ad- 
minister to the spiritual needs of rich and poor. The 
comment of deepest insight that has yet been made 
upon Kingsley's Chartist fictions is in a letter which 
Carlyle sent the author after reading ^ Alton Locke.' 
Carlyle praises ' the exuberance of generous zeal ' and 
^ a certain wild intensity,' and adds : ^ Of the grand 
social and moral questions we will say nothing at 
present; any time within the next two centuries, it 
is like there will be enough to say about them ! ' 

While Kingsley was preaching his impassioned ser- 
mons to the Chartists, Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell was 
depicting scenes in the manufacturing towns of the 
North. ^ Mary Barton ' was published in 1848 ; 
and 'North and South' in 1855. Mrs. Gaskell 
wrote from personal observation; she consulted no 
reports for statistics, and made no special tours in 
search of uncommon occurrences. As the wife of a 



THE REALISTIC REACTION 195 

dissenting minister at Manchester, her visits of charity 
gave her easy access to the homes of workmen, to neat 
suburban cottages, and to the cellars of the city, where 
women and children in darkness and fetid air were 
dying of typhus and consumption. Strikes, the mys- 
teries of trade unions, and cheap groceries were famil- 
iar facts to her. And the heart of that mill-owner 
living in the mansion on the hill was an open book, 
for she had followed his career from boyhood. She 
was wise enough to offer no final solution of the 
problem of labor and capital, beyond trying to inspire 
employer and employee with the spirit of her own rea- 
sonableness. 

To the cause of humanity, the United States con- 
tributed Harriet Beecher Stowe's ' Uncle Tom's Cabin.' 
The negro, as has been observed, was an important 
figure in fiction around the year 1800, when he was 
regarded as the most available specimen of man in 
the state of nature. In the adventures of the sea, for 
example in Marryat's, he again appeared, now amid 
the scenes of his real life in the West Indies. It is 
noteworthy, however, that the abolition of slavery in 
Great Britain and her colonies was accompanied by 
no great emancipation novel. The nearest approach 
to it was Henry Senior's belated ' Charles Vernon ' 
(1848), which gave a plain account of the ill-treat- 
ment and neglect of the slaves in the West Indies 
some forty years previous, and of which, as in Mrs. 
Stowe's novel, the heroine was a quadroon. ^ Uncle 
Tom's Cabin,' depicting slavery as it actually existed, in 
its mildest and its most inhuman forms, in the border 
states and on the southern plantations, electrified the 
United States, Great Britain, and all Europe almost 



196 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

simultaneously. Specifically an appeal to the human- 
ity of the southern slaveholder, it was in reality an 
address to the religious instincts of Christendom ; 
and it touched those instincts as no other novel has 
ever done. 

The humanitarian mood continued to color a large 
section of popular fiction down to the death of Dickens 
in 1870. By that time there was no conceivable abuse 
or shortcoming of organized society that had not had 
its satirist. But meanwliile^ Thackeray, Trollope, 
George Eliot, and others were in open dissent from 
the school of Dickens. ^ 



CHAPTEE VI 

The Return to Realism 

1. William Makepeace Thackeray 

When the humorists and humanitarians abandoned 
cathedrals and ruined castles for London slums and 
the factory towns of north England, they let the 
novel down from the picturesque heroic to the mat- 
ter of contemporary life. And while there can be no 
doubt that in individual instances they performed a 
noble work in uncovering social wrongs inherited 
from the past, they had _nevertheless created in fic- 
tion and society an atmosphere of^^lse sentiment 
about criminals and blackguards and the attitude of 
the upper to the lower classes. Carlyle visited a 
model London prison in 1850, and found it as stately 
and cleanly as a ducal palace. He tasted the bread, 
the cocoa, soup, and meat, and pronounced them ^ of 
excellence superlative.' Thackeray also knew of work- 
houses and prisons that in all appointments of health 
and comfort surpassed the most ancient foundations 
of learning. And yet the reformers in no wise abated 
their efforts. Thackeray protested in the name of 
truth against them all, and against the history of fic- 
tion since Fielding. By his ridicule and his creative 
work he brought the novel once more into the stream 

197 



198 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

of realistic tendency, where since ' Pickwick ' it had 
not kept a steady course. 

Thackeray was a critic of rare insight, detect- 
ing latent absurdities in literature and conduct, and 
bringing them to light. This critical attitude, though 
remaining with him to the very last, was most buoy- 
ant in his sketches for Frasefs Magazine and Punch, 
and in that brief afterpiece ^Eebecca and Rowena.' 
Thackeray rewrote ' Ivanhoe ' for Scott, marrying Wil- 
fred to Rebecca, and maki^gjhem the ancestors of an 
amazingly rich Hebrew family, with this marriage as 
the only blot in the scutcheon, v^ulwer's first novels 
he reviewed seriatim, exposing their artificiality, sen- 
timentalism, and jugglery with virtue and vice ; and 
in what was said of ^ the agreeably low ' and ^ the de- 
lightfully disgusting' of ^Paul Clifford,' were impli- 
cated Ainsworth and Dickens. On various occasions 
he ridiculed ^ the milk and water ' virtues of G. P. R. 
James, his conventional good morals, his poetic 
justice, and his ^ perfectly stilted and unnatural ' 
style. Of the Disraeli political and fashionable novel, 
he drew a slight sketch, in which, after the very 
manner of Disraeli, were exalted the Hebrew money- 
lender, the beauty of ^ burning auburn ' hair, and 
the comforts of the Ghetto. There was no escape 
even for his friend Lever, whose dragoon had been 
very familiar with the Emperor Xapoleon and too 
prone to shrieks of delight over stale anecdotes. 
In the course of these extravaganzas appeared ^ Barry 
Lyndon,' a superb mock heroic in defence of gam- 
bling, which stands in the same relation to Thackeray's 
other work as does 'Jonathan Wild' to Fielding's. 
'The Book of Snobs,' belonging to this period, is 



THE EETURN TO REALISM 199 

in the same vein as the burlesques, the subject of 
ridicule being not so much literature as the affecta- 
tions of society. 

In January, 1847, was issued the first number of 
'Vanity Fair.' With much good humor, Thackeray 
was now presenting his contemporary novelists with 
his ideal of a novel so well as he could express it. To 
them was conceded somewhat, particularly the historical 
background. The events of * Vanity Fair ' are assumed 
to have taken place at the Waterloo period. And all the 
novels Thackeray wrote thereafter, if not distinctively 
historical, as * Esmond ' and ' The Virginians,' have the 
historical semblance, going back, as do 'Pendennis/ 
'The Newcomes,' and ' Philip,' to Thackeray's early 
life. ' Vanity Fair ' and the rest also show the influ- 
ence of Lever's military novels. Thackeray's heroes 
are men who had fought at Blenheim, Quebec, Waterloo, 
or in India. He rarely described in detail historical 
and military events, bjit commented upon them 
shrewdly. What the public wanted^io know, who had 
had a superfluity of Waterloo stories, was what hap- 
pened at Brussels in the weeks preceding the battle ; 
what was going on at the period in London, in the 
mansions of bankers and merchants in the vicinity of 
Bloomsbury and Russell Square ; and how a dull 
young colonel and his smart wife could live on noth- 
ing a year at No. 201 Curzon Street, May Fair. 
Thackeray told them, treating his subject with great 
tact and with full deference to decorum. He brought 
to his work no conscious philosophy of the good, 
the beautiful, and the true. An arbitrary recon- 
struction of life in accord with sentimentalism, phi- 
lanthropism, or the Leibnitz formula had for him no 



200 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

allurements. His principle was that he must accept 
the world as he found it. 'It does not follow that 
all men are honest because they are poor; and I 
have known some who were friendly and generous, 
although they had plenty of money. There are some 
great landlords who do not grind down their tenants ; 
there are actually bishops who are not hypocrites ; 
there are liberal men even among the Whigs, and the 
Radicals themselves are not all aristocrats at heart.' 
The imaginative reader Srf-' Vanity Eair' and the 
group of fictions around it has no difficulty in 
hearing the voice of Thackeray addressing his brother 
novelists, as among many things he says to them : 
Your plots and characters do not conform to the 
real. Mr. Bulwer, you are a sheer sophist. You 
take as a hero Eugene Aram, and by concealing his 
real character in fine language, italicized and capi- 
talized, you would make me believe he is a much- 
abused scholar and schoolmaster. My dear brother 
Dickens, though you once thought me incompetent to 
illustrate your ' Pickwick,' I like it beyond measure ; 
but your knowledge of young women and little boys 
has its limits. The British damsel is not commonly 
gentle, demure, and ingenuous ; she is more likely to 
be a flirt, to be very deceitful, and may be delight- 
fully wicked. Little boys are, as you represent them, 
very wise, but not quite in your spiritual sense ; at 
least they were not so when I was a youngster at 
Swishtail Seminary. I will now paint you a pic- 
ture of life as it is. To please you and your audi- 
ence, I will give you two good and amiable characters : 
they shall be called Amelia and Dobbin ; and I will 
take them, not from Belgravia or Newgate, but out of 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 201 

Russell Square, from the moral middle class, where we 
find more commonly than elsewhere the patient and 
devoted daughter, wife, and mother, and the constant 
lover and husband. In contrast, I will show you that 
women may be rogues, — and he laughs in his sleeve at 
Miss Rebecca Sharp, already thinking perhaps of that 
scene (one of the three or four greatest he ever wrote) 
in which Becky's husband suddenly appears and 
strips her of her jewellery. I will present you, too, 
with some men as I have observed them in Bohemia, 
and at Lord Steyne's, with not much of the heroic in 
them, or none at all; for example. Sir Pitt Crawley, 
and his son Rawdon, who will at length sell himself 
for the governorship of an island, like dear old Sancho 
Panza, and death from yellow fever. Perhaps one of 
these gentlemen in motley had better be a coward also, 
— and Jos Sedley fleeing from Brussels flits through 
Thackeray's imagination. And finally, in contrast to 
your Lovel, Sir Walter, let us have George Osborne, 
who shall be kept from deserting his wife for an ad- 
venturess by the rumble of Napoleon's cannon, calling 
him to the battle-field to be shot dead. 

And folded with Thackeray's monologue over his 
literary brethren, is an address to the public, in which 
he tells them that they are frittering away their lives 
in buying tinsel and gewgaws at the tawdry booths of 
vanity fair. Thackeray illustrates his allegory by 
creating characters of many types, all of whom obtain 
for their schemes and frettings and heartburnings 
nothing worth the having. The elder Sedley amasses 
a fortune, only to die, a childish old man, in poverty 
and sorrow. The elder Osborne attains to a ' proud 
position' in the tallow trade, only to lose his son 



202 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

George, and to be found on a morning lying by his 
dressing-table in utter helplessness. Amelia, poking 
lier pretty head out of a Bloomsbury window, waits 
and watches there for her George, who will come to 
laugh at her perplexities. Sir Pitt Crawley, while the 
corpse of his wife still lies unburied in a darkened 
chamber, proposes to Becky; but she is already mar- 
ried to Eawdon. Poor Jos Sedley attained to his 
desire, and then passed from the earth, very soon after 
taking out an insurance policy in favor of Becky. 
Honest Dobbin served for Amelia more than double 
the time of Jacob for Eachel. sAnd how small the 
reward ! for it was only Amelia.^ 

^ Vanity Fair ' is the expression of a mood. In in- 
stinctive recoil against the representation of life in 
false lights, especially the inner life of feelnig and 
motive, Thackeray purposely overdrew for humorous 
effects. Becky Sharp, Jos Sedley, and Lord Steyne 
are exceptional characters ; in short, they are carica- 
tures, and were intended to be so. With the thor- 
oughly good and respectable Amelia and Dobbin, the 
reader is in no sort of sympathy, and the suspicion 
is inevitable that Thackeray did not wish to make 
them attractive. He left it to his readers, saturated 
with the literature of the angels, to balance the 
account of life in their own minds. Moreover, in 
those passages of ^Vanity Fair' where Thackeray 

1 Of * Vanity Ealr,' Thackeray wrote to his mother : * What 
I want is to make a set of people living without God in the world 
(only that is a cant phrase), greedy, pompous men, perfectly 
self-satisfied for the most part, and at ease about their superior 
virtue.' — Introduction to the biographical edition of 'Vanity 
Fair.' 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 203 

recurs to his text and thus explains his meaning 
of vanitas vanitatum, the drift of his social satire 
seems to lie within well-established and almost con- 
ventional bounds. His attitude toward social vice 
is much like that of the eighteenth-century essayist. 
Like Addison and Fielding, he does not ridicule 
life in and of itself. He conceives of the ends 
and aims of the life of his contemporaries — particu- 
larly and almost exclusively the middle class, to which 
he himself belonged — as nothing better than the false 
gayety and glare of vanity fair. They fall prostrate 
before rank and title, and do not know a real gentle- 
man when they see him. They marry for wealth or 
social position ; and when married and disillusioned 
they give great dinners beyond their means to keep 
up the farce. Income and name gone, they attempt 
a solution of the problem of living without labor. 
They run into debt, never intending to pay their bills, 
and flit about from place _to place, hanging upon the 
skirts of society. The curtain is rung down on an 
ostentatious funeral, a popular preacher, and a humbug 
eulogy. Of course, ' Vanity Fair ' is not an ethically 
harmonious transcript of the ways of the middle class. 
We must grant to Thackeray the reactionary mood 
and the satirical license. Beyond this, we must allow 
something to form and tradition. ' Vanity Fair ' is 
of the picaresque novels, the prime characteristic of 
which has always been the holding up to view the 
seamy side of life, — rents, rags, and uncleanness. 
Viewed in its large historical relations, the novelty 
of ^Vanity Fair' consists in its being a magnificent 
adaptation of picaresque fiction to modern society; 
and in its rogue being a woman, — a peculiarity of 



204 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

only two notable picaresque novels before Tliackeray, 
^La Picara Justina'^ (1605), by Lopez de Ubeda, 
and ^Moll Flanders' (1722), by Defoe. 

In 'Pendennis,' begun almost immediately after 
finishing ^ Vanity Fair,' Thackeray took his stand by 
Fielding, defending ^the Natural in Art,' and an- 
nouncing that he was going to present the public with 
a new ^ Tom Jones.' His specific intent was an exact 
account of the doings of a young man, at school, at 
college, in the inns of court^^^and at the clubs, as he had 
observed them. But if ' Pendennis ' be compared with 
its prototype, certain points of^ifference are clear. 
Tom Jones yields to temptation. Arthur Pendennis 
and George Warrington, bundles of high manly quali- 
ties and very great weaknesses, are for a time led 
astray by passions which they afterward overcome. 
Thackeray admits frankly that there are some pas- 
sages in the careers of his gentlemen that will not bear 
telling. Fielding concealed nothing ; ' Tom Jones ' 
is a study in the nude. Thackeray reluctantly draped 
his figures, out of respect to conventions he was in- 
clined from time to time to ridicule. 

After 'Pendennis' Thackeray turned to an extent 
against himself ; and the novels he then wrote, though 
historically of less significance, are the ones that win 
our love. There is, it is true, an ummistakable unity 
of tone pervading every scrap of his work. He never 
lost delight in unmasking affectation, sham sentiment, 
and hypocrisy of every sort. On the other hand, he 
was always reverent, even given to hero-worship 
when there was at hand an object worthy of wor- 

1 Translated from the Spanish, under title of ' The Country Jilt,' 
1707, by J. Stevens. 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 205 

ship — Shakespeare, Wolfe, or Washington. He was 
kindly, charitable, tender, and withal slightly con- 
descending. To think of fierce moral indignation 
behind the ^ Burlesques ' and ' Snobs ' or even 
* Vanity Tair,' as did Charlotte Bronte, is not to un- 
derstand them rightly. As a breaker of images his 
weapon was banter. But — and this is the drift of his 
development — in the later novels, the kindly, ten- 
der, and religious side of Thackeray came more and 
more to the front. He grew less objective, weaving 
his stories out of his heart and his dreams. The 
change is first of all visible in the subjects he chooses. 
Two of his novels, ^Esmond' and *The Virginians,^ 
are now out-and-out historical ; he leaves his own time 
and the life of which he had been a part for the life 
he had been living in his library with Addison and 
Steele, Dr. Johnson, Kichardson, and Fielding; and 
he reconstructs that life. He abounds in recondite 
literary allusions, and writes laments over the classic 
fictions of his youth, which his later-contemporaries 
have forgotten. Marked as are the differences be- 
tween ' The Virginians ' and ' Henry Esmond ' and a 
novel by Scott, they are nevertheless histories, and 
have all the ideality of romance except wild ad- 
venture. 

*The Newcomes' and ^The Virginians' are novels 
of sentiment or feeling, possessing the finer spirit of 
Sterne. In them are Thackeray's famous deathbed 
scenes : Colonel Newcome, in the dress of the poor 
gray friars, summoned into the presence of his Mas- 
ter, and answering with adsum, the word he had 
used at school ; the remorse and madness and broken 
French of the dying Baroness of Bernstein in ^ The 



206 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Virginians/ once the smart and beautiful Beatrix 
of ^ Henry Esmond.' In these scenes Thackeray is 
surely playing upon our emotions in the manner of 
Sterne. Perhaps his most tragic situation is Clive 
Newcome growing away in his intellectual and moral 
sympathies from his father, a gentleman of another age. 
' The old man lay awake and devised kindnesses, and 
gave his all for the love of his son ; and the young 
man took, and spent, and slept, and made merry.' 
The pathetic climax to the ^-situation is when the Colo- 
nel with broken heart one day goes into Olive's study 
and stammers ; ' I — I am sorry "you have any secrets 
from me, Clive.' In Thackeray's first novel, as we 
have seen, rogues and gentlemen in motley were the 
real characters; in his second novel attention was 
fixed upon two characters, lamentably weak but hav- 
ing a dash of sterling manhood in them. They were 
both novels without heroes. Thackeray's later aim 
was to portray great and commanding goodness of 
the heart in characters like Ethel, and Colonel New- 
come, Colonel Esmond, and Harry Warrington; and 
by means of them to draw attention away from worldly 
meanness. He dwells upon pardon, renunciation, for- 
giveness, reconciliation, disinterested friendship, and 
the separation of parents and children by sea and 
death; and bows his head in awe before the inex- 
plicable course of events and the mysteries of life 
and death. 

Of the style with which Thackeray invested his 
thought, it came, so far as there is any historical expla- 
nation of it, along with much in his way of thinking, 
from the eighteenth-century humorists — Addison, 
Steele, Fielding, and Sterne — and from those burlesque 



THE KETURN TO REALISM 207 

writers contemporary with his youth, among whom 
were Theodore Hook and Pierce Egan. Historical 
considerations, however, do not count for much in 
considering that sinuous style of his, adapting itself 
to plain narrative, and rising at will into eloquence, 
or meandering into the delightfully colloquial, or 
shunting off into the unexpected humorous turn. Not 
so careful in his syntax as Fielding, he is yet in his 
easy mastery of language and of grand and simple 
rhythm with the greatest of the Elizabethans. 

In construction his success was variable. He wrote 
and published in parts, and of this method there are 
inevitable consequences. He proceeded in a leisurely 
go-as-you-please manner, strewing the way with char- 
acters he wished to rid himself of, by running them 
through, giving them a fever, or letting them drop in 
an apoplectic fit. To one or two notions he held 
fast. No ghastly death would he allow, no drownings 
nor strangulations ; the corpse must look comely. 
And that the novel might have a pleasant ending, 
there must be at least one happy marriage in the last 
chapters and the restoration of a lost or sequestered 
fortune. From the standpoint of structure, ' The Vir- 
ginians ' and ' Philip ' are the weakest of Thackeray's 
work. 'Vanity Fair' and 'The Newcomes,' epic in 
their immense scope, are more rigidly dramatic than 
they are usually said to be; beneath their apparent 
carelessness of manner is ' an art that nature makes.' 
Once Thackeray wrote his entire novel before the 
publication of any part of it, and the perfect form 
of 'Henry Esmond' has been the despair of his fellow- 
craftsmen. Dickens's novels we called groups of in- 
cidents; Thackeray's are confidential conversations. 



208 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Thackeray assumes the role of showman. He exhibits 
his characters, banters and scolds them, and talks 
through them as if they were Punch and Judy and 
he the ventriloquist ; and, suddenly stopping, he turns 
to his audience, telling them all about the figures on 
the wires, and all about themselves. Characters, au- 
thor, and reader are ever coalescing and separating 
like moving shadows. This procedure is denounced 
by the more modern builders as militating against 
the conservation of character; and probably therein 
lies the danger. Let the actors^play their parts and 
the author keep silent; that is the maxim. But in 
any specific case the method must be judged by its 
success. Rawdon Crawley and Becky Sharp are among 
that small company of characters in fiction that 
really grow from page to page. Certainly nothing is 
more tiresome than commonplace moralizings. But 
Thackeray's thinking was so cosmopolitan and his feel- 
ings of so exquisite a quality that, when we think of 
him, his asides and comments are what return of tenest 
upon the memory. By means of them he awakened 
into ripple all those pleasing emotions of wit and humor 
and satire and loveliness and gentleness and reverence, 
common to the enlightened humanity for whom he, 
distinctively a man of letters, wrote. In his most 
ideal moods he was always a realist of the spirit, 
because of his sanity. 

2. Bulwer-Lytton m the Rdle of Realist, George Borrow, 
Charles Reade 

The return to realism in the nineteenth century was 
essentially a return to the manner of the great novel- 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 209 

ists of the eighteenth century. The minor humorists 
and Dickens went back in the main to the caricature 
of Smollett. Thackeray was to fiction a second 
Fielding. The product of the new realism, how- 
ever, was quite different from the old. Dickens and 
Thackeray had their own rich experiences and obser- 
vations, and both were captivated by the historical 
setting of Scott. If we were to have Smollett and 
Fielding once more, why not Sterne also? Sterne 
did appear again in the equivocations of Pierce Egan, 
in the gestures and grimaces of Dickens, and in the 
pretty sentimental scenes that Thackeray built up 
and pushed over. But the fully premeditated resto- 
ration of Sterne is a debt we owe to Bulwer-Lytton. 
Immediately after the rise of Thackeray, this talented 
novelist, who always kept his finger on the public 
pulse, writing of philosophies, criminals, fairies, 
ghosts, and Norman barons, as the heart-beat of his 
patient seemed to point ^he way, turned his atten- 
tion to Quixotic characters of couirEry life. ^The 
Caxtons' appeared in 1849, and its double continua- 
tion under the title ' My Novel ; or. Varieties in 
English Life,' in 1853. 

The scenes of these novels are English villages in 
the old days before railways, when the crotchets and 
the kindly absurdities of country manners had not 
yet been toned down by intercourse with London. 
The characters are a broken-down military captain, 
a gentleman Avith brain bewildered by useless knowl- 
edge multiplied beyond measure by syllogistic reason- 
ing from whimsical hypotheses, old-fashioned squires 
and parsons, quack doctors, refugees, beautiful young 
women created for young members of Parliament, and 



210 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

a cabinet minister and leader of the House of Com- 
mons. The action is carried on in sentences and 
chapters short and abrupt, and frequently by dia- 
logues arranged in dramatic form. Humorous pity is 
awakened by a lame and dyspeptic duck which the 
elder Caxton allows to walk about with him and which 
in kindness he tickles under the left ear ; in a donkey 
that has been thrashed for munching a thistle and is 
consoled by the parson with a ' rose cheeked apple ' ; 
and in a poor moth, which)4n^ seeking warmth by the 
Caxton fireside on a cold October evening, barely 
escapes a tragic end. '^- 

While there is undoubtedly in these two novels 
considerable autobiography and personal observation, 
especially in election scenes and the accounts of 
the actual working of government, Bulwer did not 
appreciably raise the quality of the realism of current 
fiction. He was too plainly imitative; and he took 
as his model not a realist, but a writer who had played 
fantastically with real life. Dickens and Thackeray 
were not primarily imitative. In certain peculiarities 
of manner, but not in matter, they were of the eigh- 
teenth century. In Bulwer were both the manner 
and the matter of Sterne. Perhaps the main historical 
interest in these sixteen hundred and odd pages of 
Bulwer's is that they show how the literary weather- 
cock had veered round toward realism. Similar evi- 
dence we have in Dickens. ^The Personal History 
of David Copperfield,' which closely followed ^The 
Caxtons,' was a substitute for an autobiography ; and 
as its early title indicates, it was in aim, whatever 
may be our opinion of the outcome, a transcript of 
actual experiences. 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 211 

Among the strangest and most fascinating semi- 
autobiographies of the period were George Borrow's 
^Lavengro' (1851) and 'The Komany Eye' (1857), 
one continuous novel of gypsy life and philological 
eccentricity. Borrow was the fierce critic of romance. 
Putting together the scattered shreds of his remarks, 
we have from him a history of the later romantic 
movement running in this wise: Sir Walter Scott, 
who boasted of a descent 'from the old cow-stealers 
of Buccleuch,' and who wrote 'in the sorriest of jar- 
gons,' befuddled the heads of his readers with many 
volumes of 'Charlie o'er the water nonsense.' And 
what has been the social influence of Scott's ro- 
mancing? A certain mere external gentility of de- 
corum and manner, a worship of rank, a pride of birth, 
an immense amount of cant of various sorts, and a 
conspiracy at Oxford to E-omanize the Church of 
England. Capricious as was Borrow's social satire, 
there was in it salutary truth. The public needed to 
be addressed with a frankness tha:^_Thackeray was 
unwilling to venture upon, before it could free itself 
from the slough of sentiment and sham. And Bor- 
row saw what literary criticism has since maintained,^ 
that the Oxford movement was a working of the 
romantic spirit ; that long before Newman went over 
to Eome, the mediaeval priest had already, in the 
imagination and sympathy of Scott's readers, taken 
possession of Canterbury and York. 

Borrow carried his readers back over the romantic 
revival to the adventures of Defoe. But hanging over 
his books is a dreamy, poetic glamour wanting in the 

1 See the essay on Newman by L. E. Gates, in ' Tliree Studies 
in Literature,' N.Y., 1899. 



212 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

old picaresque novel. Borrow's gentleman, nnconven. 
tional, courteous, generous, brave, and true as steel, is 
a young man who abandons the city for the trade of 
a strolling tinker and blacksmith, wandering along 
the hedges and lanes of England, and pitching his 
tent at night in lovely dingles. What Borrow admired 
was health, strength, and virility ; a robust man who 
could enjoy to the full ^ the good things which it 
pleases the Almighty to put within the reach of his 
children during their sojotK&-aipon earth.' Intensely 
human and passionate, his heroine Isopel Berners, 
^with her long beautiful hair "streaming over her 
magnificent shoulders' as she sits with Lavengro in 
the gypsies' dingle, brewing tea or trying to decline 
an Armenian noun, possesses the ideality of the 
mighty Scandinavian queens. To the gypsy camp, 
the blacksmith's forge by the roadside, and the mak- 
ing of a horseshoe. Borrow lent the magic and the 
mystery of Celtic poetry. 

Much akin to Borrow in eccentricity, robust com- 
bativeness, and a love of adventure, was Charles 
Reade. E-eade affected, particularly at first, the man- 
ner of Sterne, emphasizing his sentences by giving 
each one a paragraph, and dropping capriciously the 
threads of his narrative and taking them up at will, 
sometimes a hundred or two pages on. He recognized 
no barriers between the drama and the novel ; writing 
sometimes a play, and then turning it into a novel, and 
then again reversing the process. He was very fond 
of bringing into the novel certain conventional scenes 
of melodrama, such as the virtuous heroine listening 
unseen in the background, who rushes in and assumes 
a statuesque pose between an enraged mother and a 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 213 

disobedient son. In short, when he wrote he had in 
his mind's eye the actors on the stage, and the gal- 
leries applauding. Aware of this, he gave as sub-title 
to one of his novels ^ A Dramatic Tale,' and spoke of 
another as a ^Dramatic Story by courtesy Novel.' 

For these dramatic effects, Eeade made use of cur- 
rent types of fiction. ^Peg Woffington' (1852) is a 
delightful episode in the history of the stage, and from 
the artistic point of view solely, it is the most 
perfect novel as a whole Eeade wrote. 'Christie 
Johnstone ' (1853) has many resemblances to the work 
of Maria Edgeworth, and specifically, in its treat- 
ment of the listlessness and staleness of high life, 
it is indebted to Miss Edgeworth's 'Ennui.' 'It is 
Never too Late to Mend' (1857) and 'Hard Cash' (1863) 
are didactic novels, of which the former was directly 
inspired by 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' and was almost 
equally popular. ' The Cloister and the Hearth ' (1860) 
is a belated historical romance. ' Griffith Gaunt ' (1866) 
is an adaptation of the sentimental -criminal novel, of 
which the type is Bulwer's ' Eugene Aram.' Moreover, 
like others who felt the humanitarian impulse, Eeade 
did not believe that fiction should be written simply 
to please, but that it should contain matter for in- 
struction and edification. Accordingly all his novels, 
even the historical ones, deal with social questions, 
and usually in the controversial manner. 'Christie 
Johnstone,' for example, is an attack on hero-worship, 
a fashionable cult of sham and humbug gods estab- 
lished by the most arrant of shams and humbugs. 
Over against lords and ladies lisping Carlyle, Eeade 
sets the picturesque life of Edinburgh fishwives. In 
the portrayal of these plain folk, he aimed at the 



214 DEVELOPMENT OE THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

specific representation ; maintaining that the artist has 
no business with abstractions, with streaks of black 
paint and streaks of white paint bearing the names of 
men and women, and that the salt of life is preferable 
to the spice of fiction. 

Readers novels are documentary. In preparation 
for them he went through a laborious process, gather- 
ing and arranging facts and incidents from his read- 
ing into huge commonplace books; and with these 
books before him, he coropiied his novels with the 
same anxiety for truth that he would have displayed 
had he been preparing a thesis fbJ a doctorate at the 
University of Gottingen. Even in his descriptions of 
romantic scenes which he had never viewed with the 
physical eye, he strove for accurate local color. He 
never speaks like Kingsley of *the fragrant snow of 
blossoms ' in the tropics ; he rather takes pains to in- 
form his audience that in Australia, Hhe flowers make 
a point of not smelling, and the bushes that nobody 
expects to smell or wants to smell, they smell lovely.' 
Eor 'The Cloister and the Hearth,' he read, say his 
biographers, 'not only volumes, but book-shelves and 
libraries.' The novel is a scholar's endeavor to restore 
to the imagination of the nineteenth century, the form 
and the spirit of the fifteenth ; to portray the dawn 
of the Renaissance, Avhen mediaevalism with its asceti- 
cism and narrow outlook on life was just beginning 
to give way to the human feelings : mighty passions of 
friendship, devotion, love, and jealousy, such as we 
have in the most splendid of Italian novelle. The 
unsuccessful attempt to adjust the mediaeval ideal to 
the Greek ideal, and the strife and the conflict in 
which the mediaeval wins outwardly but not inwardly 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 215 

in the heart, are depicted in the career of Gerard, 
and incidentally in the life of a venerable pope, who 
has written novels in imitation of Boccaccio, and is 
now abandoning theological controversies and the 
Bible for an illuminated Plutarch ; Renaissance friend- 
ship in the adventures of Gerard and Denys; death- 
less devotion in Margaret ; and mad love and jealousy 
most grandly in the Princess Clselia. The romance 
was not written only for these high colors. On the 
humble characters Reade bestowed equal care; on 
innkeepers, burgomasters, peasants, adventurers, *the 
obscure heroes, philosophers, and martyrs'; on the 
hardships, struggles, and weaknesses of a Dutch 
family with its nine children, from which sprang a 
Clement and then Erasmus. 

3. Anthony TroUope 

These leaders in the return to realism — Thackeray, 
the Bulwer of 1850, Borrow, EeadCj'and Dickens be- 
fore them — had many characteristics in common. 
They were all satirists in the way of banter or invec- 
tive ; they all possessed strongly marked personalities 
which they projected into their work ; and this is their 
charm, for they were all manly men. But they were not 
dramatic in the high sense in which Jane Austen was. 
They were humorous, in the old Elizabethan meaning of 
the word; their emotions led the way, and their pens 
followed. If they were in a lyrical mood, they wrote 
poetic prose ; if their sense of justice was ruffled, they 
wrote in grand indignation; whenever they saw an 
opportunity to ridicule, then, with the exception of 
Beade, they always took it. The way to stricter real- 



216 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

ism lay in the novelist's separating himself from his 
characters ; in his withdrawal, so to speak, behind the 
scenes, so that the drama might play itself out unmo- 
lested. This was the contention and the practice of 
Anthony Trollope. 

Trollope's notion of a novel was in many respects 
the same as that of his contemporaries. In his view, 
the novel was a salutary and agreeable sermon, 
preached to recommend the virtues and to discounte- 
nance the vices. But he oBJ^cted to the manner in 
which this kind of sermon was put together by the 
social reformers. He accused Keade of not compre- 
hending his subject; and in the most savage piece 
of satire he was capable of, he rebuked Dickens for 
creating vices in the middle and upper classes, merely 
for the sake of attacking them. He even maintained 
that the literary dishonesty of the reformers had 
been bad for art; that droll beings with no blood 
in their veins were made to pass for men and women, 
that pathos had become ^ stagey and melodramatic,' 
that the comic style created by Dickens ^in defiance 
of all rules' and affected by his school was ^ jerky' 
and ' ungrammatical.' Are there not, Trollope in- 
quired, real men and women here in England, and 
humor and pathos in life as it is? 

Trollope was more in accord with Thackeray, with 
whom he was associated for several years in the most 
pleasing social and literary comradery. Indeed, he 
was, as it were, a son of Thackeray, from whom he in- 
herited much of his art and his outlook on life, with- 
out, however, the father's genius. He unmasked his 
rogues like Thackeray, but with less abandon. Ideal 
characters of goodness, nobility, and absent-minded- 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 217 

ness had some attractions for him ; and in this kind 
of character-building he occasionally fell little short 
of his master. Witness Josiah Crawley, who cannot 
explain how a certain check came into his hands, and 
Septimus Harding, who when excited hugs to his heart 
an imaginary violoncello. The old romantic device 
which Thackeray revived, of letting the same charac- 
ters appear again and again in successive novels, Trol- 
lope managed with fine effects, for he took into account 
the modifications wrought by increasing age and chang- 
ing surroundings. In sentence structure he regarded 
Thackeray as a model. Though he is not so delightful 
in his style as Thackeray, his sentences are simpler and 
more easily read, as if he also had in mind Macaulay. 
For all this, he brought, but with less vehemence, the 
same charge against Thackeray as against Dickens. At 
any period, it was his opinion, there can be to the hon- 
est man of letters only a small place for satire ; with 
Thackeray satire had become a manner and all men 
snobs. Of the romantic spirit there~was, of course, 
hardly a trace in Trollope. To him as a boy ' Ivanhoe' 
was one of the best of novels, but that enthusiasm for 
Scott was forever quenched by the utter failure of his 
one experiment in historical fiction. Raphael's ma- 
donnas, he wrote in substance when in middle life, 
were justified for Church purposes, but the real 
matrons that once walked the earth are Rembrandt's. 
It was Trollope's boast that he far surpassed all his 
English contemporaries in the literary output. He cer- 
tainly published enough — thirty-odd novels besides 
as many tales ; and most of the novels occupied three 
volumes. He accomplished so much by a method that 
he recommended to all who wish to pursue successfully 



218 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

the literary career. V^herever lie might be, m the 
drawing-room of the Athengenm Club, in a railway car- 
riage, or on the ocean, he seated himself for three hours 
as a limit, with his watch before him ; and regularly 
as it marked the quarter hour he turned off two 
hundred and hfty words, undisturbed by the stares of 
those about him. He kept two or three novels going 
at the same time; when one was finished, he began 
another on the next morning, without plan or think- 
ing of it previously at ail ;v>„§ometimes he had several 
novels in his desk awaiting a publisher. It would 
be superfluous to add that ttie result was a vast 
amount of tameness and commonplace. His Irish 
stories were out of date; his political romances had 
been forestalled by Disraeli; and many of his tales 
of English life crept very close to the ground. 

Better workmanship, however, is to be found in ' The 
Warden' (1855), 'Barchester Towers' (1857), ^Doctor 
Thorne' (1858), Tramley Parsonage' (1861), 'The 
Small House at Allington' (1864), and 'The Last 
Chronicle of Barset' (1867), consisting, all told, of 
only thirteen volumes, and known as 'The Cathe- 
dral Stories' or as 'The Chronicles of Barsetshire.' 
However rapidly these novels may have been written, 
they are not mere desk work. ' The Warden ' came to 
Trollope as an inspiration, while he was one day stand- 
ing 'on the little bridge in Salisbury.' After sketch- 
ing the opening chapter, he left the development of 
the story to a year's meditation. Its successors would 
naturally fall together in his imagination more easily 
and rapidly. The scenes of the entire series are laid 
in the cathedral town of Barchester and the surround- 
ing villages ; the characters are the clergy and their 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 219 

families, country doctors, and the gentry. Before this, 
cathedral life had only incidentally made its appear- 
ance in English fiction, as in Kingsley's ^ Alton Locke.' 
Trollope added to England a new shire and discovered 
a new theme. 

Of these Chronicles, the first two are the most closely 
threaded together, forming, in fact, one continuous 
novel. Very few new characters are introduced into 
the second, and most of the scenes lie close and com- 
pact in or near the cathedral close. The first point 
of interest is Hiram Hospital, very similar, it would 
seem, to Leicester Hospital, well known to visitors at 
Coventry. Early in the fifteenth century, one John 
Hiram, a wealthy wool-stapler, left in trust a house 
and certain meadows and closes near the town for the 
support of twelve superannuated wool-carders. The 
property through the centuries increased greatly in 
value, and the wool industry died out in Barchester. 
So, instead of wool-carders, the bishop, who had con- 
trol of the estate, usually gave these twelve places to 
the aged poor, whatever may have been their occupa- 
tion. According to the terms of the will, each inmate 
received his breakfast and dinner and sixpence a day ; 
and the residue of the income, now amounting to 
eight hundred pounds a year, was to be given to a 
warden. The position, at the time of the story, was 
regarded as a sinecure by those seeking reform in 
Church and State, especially by Dr. Anticant, Mr. 
Sentiment, and the London Jupiter, under which 
names Trollope thinly veils Carlyle, Dickens, and the 
London Times. The present incumbent, the Rev. 
Septimus Harding, has for years ministered to the 
physical and spiritual wants of the brotherhood, never 



220 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

dreaming that he has been doing wrong in receiving 
pay for his services. But when the reformers discover 
him, and he sees himself pictured out as a winebibber 
and hypocrite, he resigns his office, in spite of the 
pleading and protests of his friends ; and in course of 
time the hospital is given over to the plunder of the 
Eev. Mr. Quiverful, a type of the poor parson who 
truckles to authority for the sake of bread for his 
starving wife and fourteen children. The Episcopal 
palace is occupied by a bishop of whose character, 
though it is not strongly drawn, we see enough 
to know that he is worthy of nis place. The good 
bishop lives in the most intimate relations with 
Mr. Harding, who, besides being warden of the hos- 
pital, is precentor to the cathedral. Nine miles away 
is Plumstead Episcopi, the residence of Archdeacon 
Grantley, the bishop's son and Mr. Harding's son-in- 
law, with whom the fathers have much to do in molli- 
fying his aggressiveness. This Dr. Grantley, now in 
the very prime of life, and waiting patiently for the 
death of the dear old bishop, on which event he ex- 
pects to remove to the palace, is a fine creation. He 
is in no sense a bad man, but he is worldly and am- 
bitious, and insists, while the bishop is still living, on 
ruling the diocese. He is dignified in bearing, elegant 
in dress, and when in the pulpit he is ^a noble 
ecclesiastic' 

The bishop dies, and, owing to a change in ministry 
at the very time, he is not succeeded by his son-in- 
law, but by Dr. Proudie, who becomes, however, 
bishop in name only, for Mrs. Proudie rules the 
palace. The new bishop brings with him down from 
London as his assistant Mr. Obadiah Slope, an Evan- 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 221 

gelical reformer, who is allowed to preach the installa- 
tion sermon. He takes the occasion to attack the 
cathedral ssrvice, which has been brought to the 
perfectioi:: of art and beauty by the patient labor 
of the precentor, Mr. Harding. All the clergy of 
the diocese hear that sermon and leave the cathe- 
dral in hubbub and indignation. Now war — open, 
determined war — is waged against Mr. Slope, under 
the leadership of Dr. Grantley. Mr. Slope is pro- 
hibited from preaching again in the cathedral, and 
after a time is forced to leave Barchester. The arch- 
deacon has won, he thinks, a brilliant victory. But 
the reader of ^Barchester Towers' knows that Mrs. 
Proudie in the stillness of night won that victory. 
Mr. Slope had been Mrs. Proudie's favorite ; but when 
she saw that he was conspiring with her husband to 
weaken her authority, she rose to the fury of a Medea^ 
and Mr. Slope received his passports. ^Tiat occurred on 
that memorable night, wheli the bishop was punished 
for intriguing against his wife's authority, Trollope 
leaves us to imagine from the crushed, trembling, 
doglike, and aged face of the bishop on the next morn- 
ing. Shakespeare had his shrew, but at length Pe- 
truchio tamed her; Mrs. Proudie remains glorious in 
her triumph through volume after volume. With 
author and reader she was for years a fascination. 
Finally she met her match in the Rev. Josiah Crawley, 
who in her own palace and in the presence of her hus- 
band turned ' his great forehead and great eyebrows ' 
full upon her and silenced her meddlesome tongue with 
the simple utterance, 'Peace, woman !' 'The bishop 
jumped out of his chair at hearing the wife of his bosom 
called a woman. But he jumped rather in admiration 



222 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

than in anger/ This scene in ^ The Last Chronicle of 
Barset' was the beginning of the end. "When one 
morning the news was brought to Plumstead that Mrs. 
Proudie died last night standing erect by her bedpost, 
Mrs. Grantley ^ dropped from her hand the teaspoonf ul 
of tea that was just going into the pot/ and the arch- 
deacon remarked, ^What a relief!' thinking of the 
poor bishop as well'as of himself. 

The novelty of Trollope's clergy is in the common- 
sense standpoint from whiQh_they are viewed. Hav- 
ing never associated with bishops, deans, and arch- 
deacons, he built them up (to u^ his own expression) 
out of his 'moral consciousness.' A bishop is as 
likely to enjoy the luxury of being henpecked as the 
man on 'Change. If an archdeacon has grown up in 
aflflluence he will likely be given to display and high 
living. Just as in the wide world there are all sorts 
and conditions of men, so there are the same mot- 
ley personages within the rustling gown and cas- 
sock. Sermons may not be masterpieces of eloquence 
and reason ; they may abound in ' platitudes, truisms, 
and untruisms.' Such was the sound position, now 
extremely commonplace, that Trollope took for the 
purpose of his realistic art, and such was the position 
that long before him had been taken by Chaucer, but 
forgotten by the reading public. 

As to Trollope's characters outside of his clergy, 
many of them are merely figures of pasteboard. 
Some of them, however, are a part of his best 
work. Madame Neroni, for example, who heart- 
lessly unmasks Obadiah Slope in his love-making; 
and Bertie Stanhope, the smart young gentleman 
who sports with the passions of Mrs. Proudie, 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 223 

and gets from the enraged Juno the melodramatic 
^ Unhand it, Sir ! ' Best of all, perhaps, are his young 
women : Eleanor Bold, the widowed daughter of Mr. 
Harding, and Grace Crawley, who is married to a son 
of Archdeacon Grantley. These young women and 
many others are what we conceive the English girl 
to be : not too fine for everyday wear, solid, substan- 
tial, and withal good-looking enough. They are the 
very type of Wordsworth's ideal, and are the fore- 
runners of Mary Garth and Diana Merion. 

Trollope's plots, so far as he may have any, are 
conventional. Finding from experience that a novel 
would not sell without a dash of love-making, and 
believing that one plot was as good as another, he hit 
upon two situations he thought true to real life ; and 
he employed them over and over: a young woman 
vacillating in her choice between two or more pro- 
fessed lovers, or a young man deciding after much 
concluding which of two girls he shall marry. Upon 
the novel of mystery and difficulty irrwhich Wilkie 
Collins was an adept, he looked in wonder, and once 
dabbled with it, only to mar the beauty of his most 
tragic last chronicle of Barset. Dispensing for the 
most part with the ' wearing work ' and the • agoniz- 
ing doubt' of the skilful plot manipulator, he sits 
down comfortably and writes about his cathedral 
folk; men and women come and go; he relates 
what they said and did, and draws full-length por- 
traits of them. His main regret is ^that no mental 
method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been 
discovered by which the characters of men can be 
reduced to writing and put into grammatical language 
with an unerring precision of truthful description.' 



224 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

With, his mind concentrated upon his characters, he 
looks them full in the face, perplexed by no ethical 
or philosophical medium. By virtue of this direct- 
ness, he is the great chronicler of English fiction. 

4. Charlotte Bronte 

We have followe'd the steps by which, from Scott 
and the romantic school, the novel returned to a point 
very near where it was when feft^by Jane Austen. In 
the last stage of this reaction, the direct influence of 
Jane Austen was potent. Sign^f an awakened inter- 
est in her appeared in 1833 — the year after Scott's 
death — when her six novels found a place in Bent- 
ley's ^ Standard Novels.' The assertion of Macaulay in 
1843, that she ranks with Shakespeare in the dramatic 
delineation of character, put the seal on a Jane Austen 
cult. Five years later George Henry Lewes wrote : 
'Astonishing as Scott's powers of attraction are, we 
would rather have written "Pride and Prejudice," 
or "Tom Jones" than any of the Waverley novels.' 
Trollope, speaking in his Autobiography of his early 
literary opinions, says : ' I had already made up my 
mind that " Pride and Prejudice " was the best novel 
in the English language, — a palm which I only partially 
withdrew after a second reading of " Ivanhoe," and did 
not completely bestow elsewhere till " Esmond " was 
written.' And the art of his novels speaks more em- 
phatically than his Autobiography. 

Charlotte Bronte excited amazement when she told 
her correspondents and literary acquaintances that she 
knew nothing of Jane Austen. After reading 'Emma,' 
she sent a criticism of it to the ' reader ' of her pub- 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 225 

lishers, in which she said : ' She [Jane Austen] ruffles 
her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by noth- 
ing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown 
to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with 
that stormy sisterhood.' Thackeray expressed with 
sanity the moods of the spirit. Charlotte Bronte awoke 
the ^ stormy sisterhood ' of passions, and turned fiction 
into the channel of tragedy. In her procedure, she 
made some use of the heroics and the melodrama of 
Gothic romance. Rain pours, hurricanes blow, and 
moons rise throughout her novels ; and in two of them 
there are mysteries — the maniac in the upper story 
of Thornfield Hall, and the nun that walks by night 
in the garden of a Brussels school — which are duly 
explained as Ann Eadcliffe would have explained 
them. To these romantic incidents, Charlotte Bronte 
was driven by the pressure of publishers, who refused 
the novel she first wrote, on the ground that it was 
commonplace. Her descriptions of scenery, however 
wild, were nevertheless from observation; as the 
Yorkshire moors ^ washed from the world ' in ^ whiten- 
ing sheets ' of rain, and the cold autumn evening in 
Brussels when from her lattice she ^saw coming 
night-clouds trailing low like banners drooping.' But 
whatever decorations she may have employed to gain 
a hearing, she described herself and the aim of her 
work when she said: ^I always, through my whole 
life, liked to penetrate to the real truth ; I like seek- 
ing the goddess in her temple, and handling the veil, 
and daring the dread glance.' 

Charlotte Bronte passed most of her brief life of 
thirty-nine years on the moorland wastes of Yorkshire, 
in the little village of Haworth, where her father was 

Q 



226 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

curate. She was sent away a few miles to two board- 
ing-schools, in one of which she was for a short time 
a teacher, and then she went out twice as governess. 
She declined two proposals of marriage; and what 
was more out of the common order of events to one 
of her humble lot, she was for two years a pupil and 
teacher in the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels. Thus 
circumscribed were her experiences down to her first 
appearance in literature. When she became famous, 
she went up to London, wher^^-she first saw her pub- 
lishers, the critics, and Thackeray. Through similar 
excursions from home and a co^spondence with men 
of letters, she came into contact with varied opinions 
and beliefs, — but too late. To the end, the horizon of 
her vision never extended far beyond Hhe solitary 
hills.' The life and the literature of the south she 
could not appreciate. To her, Shakespeare, except in 
a few of his histories and tragedies, was indelicate, 
and she was afraid of him. She expected to find in 
Thackeray a stern Hebrew prophet of dauntless and 
daring mien ; she returned to Haworth still believing 
in him, but bewildered by his want of seriousness and 
his admiration of Fielding. Of all that is French in 
the character and the manners of Englishmen she had 
no comprehension whatever. 

The men and women with whom she had grown up 
in the north were of a different race; being the de- 
scendants of the Scandinavian freebooters. Their 
characteristics in distinction from the men of the 
south are well known. Back in itie fourteenth cen- 
tury, John of Trevisa contrasted the soft speech of 
Wessex with the sharp, piercing, and grating utter- 
ance of Northumbria. In the Elizabethan romance of 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 227 

' George a Green ' were described the village games 
of the West Riding, in which ^ crowns pass current/ 
The men of the north are still hard of feature, 
and abrupt and brusque in manner. For the graces 
of society they care little. But beneath their rough 
exterior beats the warm heart of the primeval 
barbarian. Manners different from theirs Charlotte 
Bronte regarded as affectations. What she saw of 
the outside world in Brussels and in London served 
merely to remind her that fate had dealt with 
her cruelly, in consigning her to a life apart. Her 
spirit rebelled, flashing up in bitter sarcasm and 
irony. 

The scenes and the characters of ^ Jane Eyre ^ (1847) 
and ^ Shirley ' (1849) are of Yorkshire ; the scene of 
^Villette' (1853) and its first sketch, 'The Professor,' 
is laid in Brussels. Into these novels Charlotte Bronte 
put the portraits of her friends and her imagined 
enemies, and her own travails of the spirit. That 
this is true, every piece of fresh information concern- 
ing her more and more confirms. And yet her novels 
do not lie outside the trend of English fiction, detached 
and isolated. In them she is remonstrating against 
the novel of the circulating library. When she began 
writing, the heroes and heroines of novels prepared 
for young ladies and gentlemen were made ideally 
perfect. The approach of the heroine was announced 
by the rustling of voluminous muslin, whose quality 
was described as the whitest and finest. When she 
came tripping in in sandals, long ringlets were seen 
falling over a drooping head and a swan neck, and 
she was declared tender, soft, languishing, and inno- 
cent. The hero was the pink of kindness and grar 



228 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

ciousness ; and when, after three volumes of courtship, 
he won a reluctant bride, he was told to be never 
cross or wayward with her. The best novels of this 
species — a lingering on of the '■ Sir Charles Grandi- 
son' tradition — were those written by Mrs. Anne 
Marsh-Caldwell. Even Anne and Emily Bronte were 
careful to keep their heroines beautiful in ' Wildf ell 
Hall' and 'Wuthering Heights,' though to no such 
extreme. The Bronte sisters, after the sewing, knit- 
ting, bread-making, and generaKhousekeeping of the 
day, when all was quiet in the Haworth parsonage, 
used to sit down and talk over_their stories as they 
were progressing. On one of these occasions, Char- 
lotte told Anne and Emily that they were ^morally 
wrong ' in adopting the conventional heroine, and said 
to them, ' I will show you a heroine as plain and 
as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any 
of yours.' 

Jane Eyre was the new heroine. It is her character 
alone that fascinates, — her fiery spirit, her hatred of 
self-righteousness, and her love of truth. An orphan, 
cruelly treated in childhood by her aunt on whom she 
is dependent, Jane is sent away to school, becomes a 
teacher and governess, and finally marries Edward 
Eochester, the father of one of her pupils. This 
situation — a young woman entering life under social 
disadvantages, and after many struggles winning 
the place she deserves — is clearly . the one intro- 
duced into fiction by Marivaux and established by 
Eichardson. It was, in 1847, more than hackneyed. 
The novelty was in the management of the situation, 
and in the hard details taken from the life of 
a real governess. Pious moralizings, scenes of idyllic 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 229 

friendship and love-making, there were none. Their 
places were taken by malice, hate, and a love of 
infinite tenderness, uncouth in its earlier manifesta- 
tions. The aim was to represent a young woman who 
should speak and act the truth under all circum- 
stances, with no thought of the consequences to her- 
self or others. A little girl, Jane Eyre looks her aunt 
full in the face and tells her she hates her for 
her cruelty ; and when asked by a Pharisee what she 
must do to escape punishment after death, she replies, 
^ I must keep in good health and not die.' At a charity 
school, where the famished girls are fed on burnt 
porridge and rusty meat, and go to bed too tired to 
dream, and rise in the morning to wash themselves in 
frozen water, she squares her conduct likewise by 
truth, enduring reprimand and infamy, while hoping 
for a new and easier servitude. A governess at Thorn- 
field, she is still her own keeper in her relations with 
Eochester, who is equally no conventional hero. He 
is over forty years old, his nose is big;~Ms nostrils are 
full and open; his mouth and jaws are grim and 
sinister, his chest is too massive for his legs. He is 
haughty, domineering, and tyrannical. He is never- 
theless Jane's ideal of a gentleman. She can sit by him 
and hear him tell in detail the story of his escapades 
in Paris and elsewhere, and then declare that she loves 
him and is ready to marry him. What this man, 
who would have bfeen the villain in the old novel, has 
done under misguidance and temptation does not 
greatly distress her, for she sees in him a better self. 
She goes to the altar with him ; and when the mar- 
riage rite is there interrupted, she still clings to him, 
and leaves him only when her conscience tells her it 



230 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

is right to do so. When that moment of decision comes, 
she does not hesitate to choose vagabondage to deg- 
radation. When Rochester loses a hand and an eye 
in trying to rescne from fire his maniac of a wife, 
Jane returns to him, after her wanderings ; watches 
over him, marries him, and loves him the more for 
his mutilated arm and ^cicatrized visage.' It is no 
marriage of the world or of the flesh; it is of the 
spirit. 

^Jane Eyre,' published undeiT^he name of Currer 
Bell, was understood neither by the critics nor by the 
public. Who is this Currer Bell ? — man or woman ? 
The audacity of the novel points to a man; its little 
details of dress to a woman ; but then a man may get 
these minutise from his sister or wife. If a woman, 
she is unsexed. Perhaps she may be Becky Sharp, 
who is taking revenge for her treatment in 'Vanity 
Fair,' — then appearing in monthly numbers. Doesn't 
Rochester strike you as a caricature of Thackeray ? 
So rumor ran. In the interim 'Jane Eyre' was 
being widely read on both sides of the Atlantic. 
Here in the New England states it produced for some 
months what a reputable critic of the time called a 
Jane Eyre fever. Young women played the part of 
Jane Eyre, denouncing hypocrites and moralists in 
sentimental paradoxes ; and young men swaggered in 
the presence of ladies. In England the novel was 
denounced as immoral and irreligftus. The boorish 
manners therein depicted and its strange love-making 
were unknown outside of the north; and there they 
occasioned no criticism, for they belonged to the com- 
mon order of things. No book was ever written with 
sincerer motives, or sprang more directly from an 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 231 

aching heart. It was a criticism of the vast structure 
of modern manners built up on Norman convention- 
alities, in the light of the truth of a simpler civiliza- 
tion. 'Jane Eyre' was of its time. The Zeitgeist 
had reached the great northern moors. While in 
the south laboring men were organizing, massing, 
and demanding their rights, and clergymen and 
politicians in easy circumstances were preaching 
to them Chartism and social millenniums, the same 
democratic voice was coming from the north out of 
the very heart of its people : ' Millions are condemned 
to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent 
revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many 
rebellions beside political rebellions ferment in the 
masses of life which people earth.' 

' Shirley ' (1849) is milder in tone ; in it Charlotte 
Bronte is not quite herself. Much disturbed by criti- 
cism of 'Jane Eyre,' she undertook to profit by it, 
particularly by the advice of George_Jienry Lewes, 
who told hef to avoid poetry, sentiment, and melo- 
drama, and to read Jane Austen. She now sought to 
daguerreotype Yorkshire life and scenes ; and this is 
the way she did it. Eor an enveloping plot of excit- 
ing incident, she went back some forty years to the 
commercial troubles with the United States, and to 
the contest between mill-owners and operatives over 
the introduction of labor-saving machinery. She thus 
made for herself *an opportunity to describe the bat- 
tering of a woollen mill by starlight, and the shooting 
of the manager. In this setting she placed Yorkshire 
men and women with whom she was acquainted, — her 
sister Emily, her father, her school friends, one of her 
lovers, and the neighboring curates. Incident, too. 



232 DEVELOPMENT OE THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

she reproduced from life, with varying degrees of 
modification. The novel is thus an historical allegory. 
It is hardly necessary to observe that it is constructed 
on false notions of art and on a complete misunder- 
standing of Jane Austen. It is, however, as a descrip- 
tion of externals the most careful and most sympathetic 
of all Charlotte Bronte's work, and is still the novel of 
hers most liked by Yorkshiremen, who see themselves 
there. The portrait which has the most unusual interest 
is the minute study of Emily Brente under the name 
of Shirley Keeldar. In all her moods and loves and 
changes of feature under excitement, Charlotte repre- 
sents her, — her indolence, her passion for fierce dogs 
and the moors ; the quivering lip, the trembling voice, 
the eye flashing dark, the dilating nostrils, the sarcas- 
tic laugh, the expansion of the frail body in indigna- 
tion, and her wild picturesque beauty when visited by 
one of her rare dreams, such, for example, as the vision 
of Nature, the Titanic mother. 

^ Shirley ' failed to please Lewes, who was expecting 
another ' Pride and Prejudice.' To his flippant criti- 
cism Charlotte Bronte replied cavalierly, and became 
herself once more. ' Villette ' has never been quite so 
popular as ' Jane Eyre,' for its scenes are not English, 
and to the critic its mechanism is crude and amateur- 
ish. Its main situation is a reproduction of that in 
^Jane Eyre,' with a new setting and new incidents. 
The obstacle that kept Jane Eyre and Eochester apart 
was difference in social position ; that between Lucy 
Snowe and Paul Emanuel is religion. In ^ Jane Eyre,' 
society was viewed from the standpoint of a govern- 
ess ; in ^Villette,' as it appears to a school-teacher 
who has some difficulty in managing her pupils. In 



THE RETURN TO REALISM 233 

her first novel Charlotte Bronte's style was wildly, 
glowingly Celtic; in ^Shirley' it was rhetorical; in 
^Villette' it is more subdued in tone, and rendered 
more intense and compact by brief and forcible meta- 
phor. This change in style has its correlative in 
deeper and more intense feeling. The defiance of 
^Jane Eyre' has exhausted itself and settled into 
despair. States of mind are now subtly analyzed 
that verge upon madness. The debits and the credits 
in the account of life are reckoned up, and the books 
will not balance, for there is so little to be set over 
against pain and grief. 

We have in Charlotte Bronte a realist of the feel- 
ings, trailing, however, the bright colors of romanti- 
cism. Her descriptions of the outside of things, of 
men and manners, we have not much dwelt upon, for 
the reason that they proceeded so often from preju- 
dice and incomplete knowledge. E,oman Catholics 
and Methodists, the patrons of boarding-schools, and 
English and French girls, we cannot believe were as 
she saw them. At any rate, her significance in the 
course of fiction is that she delineated the intense 
moods of her own heart and imagination, which have 
their rapport in the moods of the race. In 'Jane 
Eyre' and 'Villette,' photography of manners has 
passed into that inner photography which Trollope 
lamented as an art beyond his power of vision. The 
next epoch-making step in internal realism was taken 
by G-eorge Eliot, when she dealt with states of con- 
science and feeling psychologically, arranging and 
defining them with an attempt at scientific precision. 



CHAPTER yil 

The Psychological Novel 

1. Elizabeth Gaskell — The Ethical Formula of the 
Psychologists 

Between Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot is, 
however, Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, whose factory novels 
we have briefly described. ']^ her work there is 
another and a less polemic side. Hardly aspiring to 
the title of novelist, she frequently reminded her pub- 
lic that she was writing only tales. These tales were 
told in the first person, and for the moral edification 
of her own sex. In form and aim they are accordingly 
of the Edgeworth type. Indeed Mrs. Gaskell may be 
said, in a general way, to have performed in them the 
same noble service to her contemporaries that Maria 
Edgeworth did to hers. She entered into the thoughts 
and wayward moods of children with true insight ; she 
gave us the first English nurses and housekeepers of 
hard common sense and racy wit, the Nancys and the 
Sallys. Her style, too, at times is most felicitous, as 
when she says : ' Edith came down upon her feet a 
little bit sadder ; with a romance blown to pieces ' — a 
sentence which in the natural course of events should 
have been written by George Meredith. One province 
she discovered and made her own — feminine society in 
out-of-the-way towns and villages before the encroach- 
ment of railroads and penny postage. Of this life 
^Cranford' (1853) is the classic. Here is described 

234 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL 235 

the old-style etiquette, the genteel poverty, the formal 
calls, and evening parties, of a village wholly in the 
possession of the Amazons — widows and spinsters — 
where no men are tolerated, except the country doctor, 
who is allowed to stay there occasionally over-night 
when on his long circuit. Old maids spend their time in 
tea-drinking and stale gossip, and in chasing sunbeams 
from their carpets. Before going to bed they peep 
beneath the white dimity valance or roll a ball under 
it, to be sure no lachimo with ^ great fierce face ' lies 
concealed there. So ends the day of trivialities and 
Gothic fears. ' The Moorland Cottage ' (1850) will al- 
ways have a special interest, for George Eliot in ^ The 
Mill on the Floss ' revivified some of its incidents and 
characters : the water, Maggie, the stubborn ^ little 
brown mouse,' her tyrannical brother Edward, and her 
fault-finding mother. 

'Ruth' (1853), which probably long ago departed 
from the imagination of novel readers, occupies a very 
important position in the history of JEnglish fiction, 
for it follows certain ethical lines more ostensibly than 
any previous novel — what may be called the doctrine 
of the act and its train of good or evil. ' All deeds,' 
says Mrs. Gaskell, ' however hidden and long passed by 
have their eternal consequences.' The doctrine was 
not new to literature, for it was not new to observation. 
Macbeth hesitated to assassinate Duncan, for he feared 
there might issue from the deed a series of extremely 
disagreeable events over which he could have no control. 
This ethical theory,^ which Carlyle and likewise 

1 For a full exposition of this ethical theory, see the study on 
George Eliot, by M. Ferdinand Bruneti6re, in ' Le Roman Natu- 
raliste,' Paris, 1892. 



236 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Comte were popularizing, Mrs. Gaskell employed for 
unifying her plot. Eutli is an attractive sewing-girl, 
who at the age of sixteen is betrayed by a young 
gentleman and abandoned. At the point of suicide, 
she is rescued by a Dissenting minister, who takes 
her and the child into his home, where at the 
suggestion of his spinster sister, she passes for a 
widow. In the course of time Euth's offence and the 
parson's deceit are suddenly and unexpectedly re- 
vealed, and then follows the reti^ib^tion. The respect- 
able part of the parson's congregation deserts him ; 
and Euth, shunned by the village folk, becomes nurse 
to patients in typhus fever, from one of whom (who 
turns out to be her former lover) she is infected, and 
dies. Mrs. Gaskell works her scenes up to crises, 
where some one must make a decision as to his course 
of action, to what she once called 'the pivot on which 
the fate of years moved'; and then she studies the 
influence of the act on a small group of characters. 
The motives and the constraining circumstances 
that lead to the decision are analyzed in detail. We 
know precisely why Euth makes her early mistake 
and why the parson conceals it ; and two pages are 
devoted to cataloguing the reasons why a country 
gentleman takes his candidate for Parliament to a 
luxurious house by the sea to pass Sunday. 

When we speak broadly, we call all novels of the 
inner life i)sychological. The old romances were psy- 
chological, because of their craft of love ; so too was 
Eichardson, because of his minute record day by day 
of the fluctuations of a woman's heart ; so too Thack- 
eray, and brilliantly, in his Beatrix and Eebecca ; and 
Trollope in his delicate analysis of the aged warden's 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL 237 

conscience. Charlotte Bronte was preeminently psy- 
chological in the portraits of Lucy Snowe and Paul 
Emanuel. But ' Ruth ' announces the approach of the 
psychological novel in a restrictive sense. The out- 
ward sequence of its incidents is the correlative of an 
inner sequence of thought and feeling, which is 
brought into harmony with an ethical formula and 
accounted for in an analysis of motive. Mrs. Gaskell 
did not possess the clearness of vision, the equip- 
ment of knowledge, and the breadth of horizon requi- 
site for completely satisfying this definition of the 
psychological novel. What she did in part was 
fully accomplished by George Eliot. 

2. George Eliot 

Like Shakespeare, with whom she has often been 
compared, George Eliot (Marian Evans) was born in 
the English midlands. Her early life^ was passed in 
and near Nuneaton and in Coventry. Brought up 
in the strictest Evangelicism, she came into contact 
in Coventry with the positivism and the destructive 
Biblical criticism which were filtrating into English 
thought; and, after a severe spiritual struggle, she 
broke away completely from the faith of her child- 
hood. The first intimation she gave that she might 
turn to novel-writing as a profession was in October, 
1856, when she wrote for The Westminster Be- 
vievj a delightfully audacious analysis of the current 
fashionable and religious novels by lady novelists. In 
BlackwoocVs Magazine for January, 1857, appeared the 
first part of 'The Sad Eortunes of the E,ev. Amos 
Barton.' The career of Geor.sre Eliot the novelist, thus 



238 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

begun, covers twenty years. So violent a change in 
her manner is marked by * Eomola/ that it is an aid 
to criticism to divide her novels into two groups. To 
the first group belong ^ Amos Barton/ ^ Mr. GilfiFs 
Love-Story/ ' Janet's Eepentance ' — which were pub- 
lished together in 1858, under the title ^ Scenes from 
Clerical Life/ — ^ Adam Bede ' (1859), ^ The Mill on 
the Floss' (1860), and ^ Silas Marner' (1861). The 
second group comprises ^ Eomola ' (1863), ^ Felix Holt ' 
(1866), ^Middlemarch' (1871-7^ and ^Daniel De- 
ronda' (1876). 

At first George Eliot took Elizabeth Gaskell as her 
model in the externals of her art and in the choice of 
her subject. These external resemblances are mani- 
fest in the names of characters : Mary Barton becomes 
Milly Barton; and Maggie Brown, Maggie Tulliver. 
The ' Scenes from Clerical Life ' are tales like Eliza- 
beth Gaskell's; ^Adam Bede' and 'Euth' are both 
studies in the consequences following the erring of 
a passionate moment. ^The Mill on the Floss' and 
* The Moorland Cottage ' are both novels of childhood 
and early youth. For an historical setting both novel- 
ists went back to the manners of an ^ elder England,' 
to the time when Coleridge and Wordsworth were 
boys, and people laughed at the ^Lyrical Ballads.' 
Note well, however, the point of dissidence. After 
reading ^Euth' in 1853, this is George Eliot's criti- 
cism : ^ Mrs. Gaskell seems to me to be constantly 
misled by a love of sharp contrasts, — of " dramatic " 
effects. She is not contented with the subdued color- 
ing, the half tints, of real life.' In this passage 
George Eliot laid her finger upon the very defect of 
Mrs. Gaskell as a realist so soon as she attempted to 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL 239 

depict life with which she was not thoroughly ac- 
quainted. Euth is the soul of goodness, and her 
betrayer is the soul of villany. George Eliot had 
seen too much of life, and observed character too 
closely, to fall into the error of dividing men and 
women into angels and demons. The criminal novel 
as written by Bulwer-Lytton and many others, she re- 
garded as romance. She had nothing in common 
with Thackeray. Between her and Dickens the 
bond was closer than criticism has yet taken note 
of. Dickens taught her, as he has taught every Eng- 
lish novelist since his time, the art of minute observa- 
tion. Moreover, when describing the death of Milly 
Barton, she cadenced her sentences in the very Little 
Nell manner. But though always a friend of Dickens 
and profoundly impressed by his sad and worn face, 
she nevertheless criticised his portrayal of the inner 
life as transcendental and unreal. What her own 
aims were in distinction from those of Jier contempo- 
raries, she told her first publishers, and often repeated 
to her audience : she would give a sympathetic render- 
ing of common life as we have it in Dutch painting, 
and in a style held in firm intellectual restraint. 

In the first group of her novels, she confined herself 
mostly to her experiences and observations as a War- 
wickshire girl. By the church at Chilvers Coton, 
near Nuneaton, is the tomb of Milly Barton, bearing 
another name. With her sad fate George Eliot was 
perfectly familiar. At a short distance, in the Wed- 
dington churchyard, lies the body of the inebriate 
Dempster who ruled at the Bed Lion. His dark 
career, the riot he instigated against the Evangelical 
Tryan, and the patient suffering of his wife, are all 



240 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

well-known traditions about Nuneaton. The charac- 
ters and the incidents in ' Adam Bede ' have to some 
extent their prototypes in family history. The first 
two volumes of ^ The Mill on the Floss ' are somewhat 
autobiographic, Tom Tulliver being Isaac Evans, and 
Maggie George Eliot herself. Likewise George Eliot's 
scenery is either that of Warwickshire, or of Derby 
and Stafford, where she visited when a child. 

The charm of this early work i^er perfect aesthetic 
sympathy with midland life. She was able, without 
any air of benevolent condescei;ision, to place herself on 
the level of her characters, to see things just as men 
and women of the class she depicts would see them, 
and to talk just as they would talk. The workshop 
of Jonathan Burge and the kitchen at the Hall Farm 
are apparently as interesting to her as to Adam Bede 
and Mrs. Poyser. With Maggie Tulliver, she becomes 
a child, who quarrels with her brother, and runs 
away to the gypsy camp. As Maggie grows up, George 
Eliot's mind grows with her; she is tempted with 
her, and goes with her to the Red Deeps, where she 
sits listening to the ^hum of insects' and watching 
^the heavenly blue of the wild hyacinths.' She is 
with Silas Marner as he counts his gold at midnight ; 
and thence she passes to a Christmas ball at the Ked 
House, and to the racy gossip of the Eainbow Inn. 
It is curious that it should have been left to George 
Eliot to do justice to Dissent, and to those members 
of the Established clergy who were not in orthodox 
standing on account of their Evangelical tendencies. 
Ever since Smollett, the irregular clergy of fiction had 
been hypocrites or grotesque figures. So faithful 
were George Eliot's portraits of them, that the Dis- 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL 241 

senters believed the ^ Scenes from Clerical Life ' were 
written by one of their number ; and in fact a Dis- 
senter was found who acknowledged himself as their 
author, and thus enjoyed for a short time a brilliant 
literary reputation for which unaided he had strug- 
gled in vain. It is true George Eliot's irregular 
clergymen are narrow; they do not include in their 
scheme of salvation Roman Catholics, and they have 
some doubts about the future happiness of Protestants 
who cling tenaciously to the Establishment. But they 
are sincere; and from them comes the only inspira- 
tion that quickens the moral sense of the country 
folk. One of the characters made most attractive 
in ^Adam Bede,' is Dinah Morris, the Methodist 
exhorter, who, as she stands on a summer evening 
in 'an amphitheatre of green hills' pleading with 
the villagers of Loamshire, sees in vision bending 
from above Christ in heightened form, weeping, and 
stretching out his arms to the rough and weary faces 
before her. Instead of making light of" the hallucinar 
tion of the scene, George Eliot remarks that such a 
faith was to them 'a rudimentary culture.' 

Another result of the flexibility of George Eliot's 
imagination is the dramatic quality of her pathos and 
humor. Of course, humor and pathos in any novel 
are in their last analysis personal. There are, how- 
ever, different ways of expressing humor and pathos. 
Our master humorists of the old school, Fielding and 
Thackeray, made no attempt to conceal the origin of 
their emotions. To do so was not in accord with their 
purpose. When they think that it is not sufficiently 
clear that they are speaking their sentiments through 
their characters, they pause and throw in a paragraph 



242 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

or a chapter iii propria persona. George Eliot, too, is 
always present as an interested spectator, but she 
keeps herself distinct from her characters and her 
drama. She was profoundly convinced of 'the diffi- 
culty of the human lot,' and that conviction is what 
makes her novels so pathetic in their conclusions. 
But her pathos does not appear to come from herself ; 
it rises from the situations she chooses, and is thus 
apparently of life itself. She saw tlie^umorous side 
of the doings of vicars and parsons, housewives, and 
loiterers at the Ked Lions and ^t the Eainbows. But 
we are not to suppose that the racy and proverbial 
sayings of these people are from shreds of conversa- 
tion remembered from childhood. Not at all; they 
are of George Eliot's own mintage, receiving only 
their stamp from the tone of the midlands. They are 
so intimately associated with her characters, that when 
they are excerpted, their piquancy is gone. George 
Eliot completed the work of Wordsworth: in the 
spirit of a measureless humanity, he dealt with the 
pathos of the pastoral life; she mingled its pathos 
and its humor. 

Of 'Eomola,' George Eliot, who was a nice critic of 
her own work, said: 'I began it a young woman — I 
finished it an old woman.' This remark is indicative 
of the differences between the two groups of her novels. 
The first novels were written between the ages of 
thirty-seven and forty-one, and in rapid succession; 
the later novels, between the ages of forty-two and 
fifty-seven, and in slow succession. George Eliot 
exhausted her Warwickshire material quickly. For 
the last volume of ' The Mill on the Floss,' she made 
an excursion to Gainsborough. For 'Romola,' she 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL 243 

visited Florence, and read all that came in her way on 
Florentine art and manners and history in the fif- 
teenth century, ploughing her way through thick 
quartos. In 'Felix Holt' and ' Middlemarch,' she 
returned to the midlands, but the freshness and glory 
of Warwickshire scenery was departing. ^Daniel 
Deronda ' opens in a brilliant Continental gambling 
salon, and, after passing through the woods and parks 
of Surrey, loses itself in the London Jewry and the 
cabala. Its scenes and incidents come largely of 
special study and preparation. Moreover, in common- 
place men and manners George Eliot is losing her in- 
terest ; the eye that has looked outward quite as much 
as inward is now concentrated on mental and moral 
facts, and out of herself she creates her characters to 
illustrate her psychological discernments. 

This change was brought about in the main by 
two influences — Walter Scott and Auguste Comte. 
When hardly eight years old, George Eliot came 
under the enchantment of 'Waverley,' as she has 
told of it in the motto to. the fifty-seventh chapter 
of ' Middlemarch.' This early delight in Scott, which 
afterward gave way to the moralists, began to assert 
itself anew in middle life. There is more romance in 
' Eomola ' than in ' The Fortunes of Nigel.' Concerning 
the second influence, she wrote in 1867, ' My gratitude 
increases continually for the illumination Comte has 
contributed to my life.' The following sentences from 
the ' Systeme de Politique Positive ' (1851-54) would 
suggest that the illumination she received was not 
wholly ethical: 'The principal function of Art is to 
construct types on the basis furnished by Science.' 
. . . 'Art controls the Ideal, indeed, by systematic 



244 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

study of the Heal ; but only in order to furnisli it with 
an objective basis, and so to secure its coherence and its 
moral value.' This is the aesthetic code that inspired 
^Komola/ ' Middlemarch,' and ^Deronda'; it is the 
code of philosophical idealism, which has very little 
in common with the Dutch realism elaborated and 
defended in ' Amos Barton ' and ^ Adam Bede.' 

Notwithstanding all these differences between her 
earlier and her later work, George Eliot ^va^ from first 
to last a philosopher and moralist. All her novels and 
tales are constructed on the ethical formula of Mrs. 
Gaskell's ' Ruth.' For the waj^in which she thought 
out and applied this doctrine of the act and its train of 
good and ill, the only appropriate epithet is magnifi- 
cent. She explained chance and circumstance, giving 
to these words a new content. All happenings, she 
showed, are but the meeting and the intermingling of 
courses of events that have their source in the inner 
history of mankind. This invisible medium in which 
we move is outside of time. The past is here in what 
was done yesterday; the future is here in what is 
done to-day; and 'our finest hope is finest memory.' 
Whatever may be her method of telling a story, — 
whether she begins at the beginning or breaks into 
the midst of her plot and in due time gathers up its 
threads, — George Eliot always comes quickly to an 
incident which discovers somewhat the moral quality 
of her characters ; and then she proceeds slowly with 
their self-revelation. Arthur Donnithorne, stepping 
one day into Mrs. Poyser's dairy as if by chance, 
speaks to ^ a distractingly pretty girl ' in the charming 
attitudes of making butter ; and she blushes in reply. 
These are incidents which in most novels we should 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL 245 

pass by as of no moment. But in this case there is 
meaning in the word simply spoken and the respon- 
sive blush. Clandestine meetings follow ; and the 
bitter soon begins to mingle with the sweet. The 
generous young gentleman thinks that he can turn the 
ill consequences of his conduct from the dairymaid 
upon himself ; he is soon illumined on this point, and 
lives to see in the wreck of himself and of others for 
which he is responsible that ' there's a sort of wrong 
that can never be made up for.' When a little girl 
Gwendolen Harleth ^ strangled her sister's canary-bird 
in a final fit of exasperation at its shrill singing which 
had again and again jarringly interrupted her own ' ; 
and atoned for her cruelty, as she imagined, by buy- 
ing for her sister a white mouse. That incident, which 
in its startling self-revelation haunted her memory 
like a bad dream, was but typical of her career as a 
young woman. She went on imagining that she could 
make life conform to the pressure of hej own desires. 
A short experience as the wife of Mr. Mallinger 
Grandcourt humbled her to the dust, where she lay 
*with closed eyes, like a lost, weary, storm-beaten 
white doe, unable to rise and pursue its unguided 
way.' And when she did rise, she found it necessary 
to discard her cruel egoism and to adjust her conduct 
to the presence of others. 

Again, on a fair spring morning in 1492 a ship- 
wrecked stranger awoke in Florence. He was a 
beautiful Greek of sunny face, who was on his way 
to Venice, where he hoped to sell some jewels in- 
trusted to him, and with the proceeds to ransom from 
the Turks his foster-father, to whom he owed all his 
culture and attainments. He disposed of some of his 



246 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

jewels at once in Florence, and then asked himself. 
Why should I trouble myself about my father, who 
likely died long ago ? why should I run the risk of 
a possible capture of myself? why not remain here, 
where I am assured of pleasure and an easy career ? 
He yielded to the temptation, and from that moment 
began his descent to treachery and broken vows. He 
betrayed all who placed their trust in him, Eomola, 
Tessa, and Savonarola. Regardless of othv^rs^he at- 
tempted to steer his course so that there might be 
no grating rubs against the shingle. For a time he 
succeeded. But one day Tito "^iwoke on the banks of 
the Arno to feel the great fingers of Baldassarre press- 
ing upon his throat. 

As a study in moral decay, ' Romola ' is undoubt- 
edly George Eliot^s sternest effort. The novel does 
not, however, take so complete possession of one as 
^ Middlemarch ' with its English scenes and char- 
acters. ' Komola ' is a tragedy of crime, the successor 
to ^Adam Bede,' which is a tragedy of youthful 
passion. ' Middlemarch ' is a tragedy of lost ideals. 
Dorothea Brooke is a beautiful, plainly dressed Quaker- 
ess. She has read the lives of Hooker and Milton, 
learning how the former was henpecked, and the latter 
was deserted by his wife Mary, and abused by his 
daughters. She would have liked, she often repeated, 
to have been the helpmate of the sweet and loving 
Hooker ; and she would have gladly sat and read to 
the blind Milton. She meets Mr. Casaubon, and to 
her he is a Milton or a Hooker living in the present. 
He proposes and she accepts him at once. A few 
weeks later she is with him at Lowick Grange ; and 
finds the copying and sifting for a genius not quite 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL 247 

what she thought it to be when she used to pity 
the poor Hookers and the blind Miltons. She fails 
miserably in her rdle as martyr. Edward Casaubon, 
of sallow face and blinking eyes, has labored a lifetime, 
weary days and wearier nights, over a *Key to All 
Mythologies.' There was nothing ignoble in the im- 
possible ideal he set for himself when a young student 
many years ago. But in his pursuit of Egyptian 
divinities, he loses his grasp upon the delights of the 
present moment. He will correct the error of over- 
studiousness, by marrying a young and beautiful wife. 
He will burst the barriers of his virgin affection that 
has long been pent up like the waters of a mountain 
lake, and let it overflow in wild torrents. The day of 
astonishment comes, when he sees that that impetuous 
and refreshing stream of his love is a tiny, insignifi- 
cant rill losing itself in the arid sands of a withered 
and desolate nature. He becomes jealous of Will 
Ladislaw, and then uneasy and irritable. At length 
his heart loses the rhythm of its beat, and finally 
ceases to beat at all. Edward Casaubon sought to 
remove what to his vision was a mistake far back in 
his career, and the hoped-for cure was his death. 

Dr. Lydgate, a young man twenty-seven years old, 
comes to Middlemarch with the intention of carrying 
forward the researches of Bichat, a distinguished 
French anatomist, who, after opening new vistas in 
biological science, suddenly died in the midst of his 
labors. It is not long before Dr. Lydgate is very 
unexpectedly called upon to cast the deciding ballot 
as to who shall be chaplain to an infirmary. That 
ballot also decides what his own career is to be. In 
his arrogant egoism, he suppresses forever his intel- 



248 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

lectual selfhood ; lie turns his back upon a kind-hearted 
friend, and unwittingly places himself under the thumb 
of Mr. Bulstrode, the banker and hypocrite. The want 
of balance between his intellect and his passions leads 
also to certain other acts on which he had not counted. 
He is soon married to Eosamond Vincy. His practice 
gradually decreasing owing to his connection with 
Bulstrode, he has not the wherewithal to satisfy 
creditors pressing payment for furniture, pla^e, and 
jewels. And the paradise of ^ sweet laughs ' and Mblue 
eyes,' over which he had been dreaming ever since 
he first saw Miss Vincy, proVes to be a disastrous 
illusion. At the age of forty. Dr. Lydgate, of magnifi- 
cent possibilities, is thoroughly disenchanted. Instead 
of completing the unfinished work of Bichat, he has 
become a fashionable physician at bathing-places, and 
distinguished himself by writing a treatise on the 
gout. In the prime of life, his hair still brown, now 
and then conscious of visitations from his earlier self, 
he comes to the close of his career. 

Is there not another picture to be set over against 
these scenes of frustrated plans ? Undoubtedly there 
is; but the imagery of light is not so effective as 
the imagery of darkness. George Eliot has her 
paradise as well as Dante. Of a fine act she says, 
' It produces a sort of regenerating shudder through 
the frame, and makes one feel ready to begin a new 
life.' And as a large motive to it she says, ^That 
things are not so ill with you and me as they might 
have been, is half owing to the number who lived 
faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.' 
That was a fine act of Mary Garth's when she stoutly 
refused to ^ soil the beginning ' of her life by burning 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL 249 

the will of Mr. Featlierstone. And she became one 
of those strong, honest mothers of our race, such as, 
says George Eliot, Rembrandt once loved to paint. 
Silas Marner, when his greed for gold and his com- 
passion for a starving and freezing child came into 
conflict, took in Eppie and nursed her as a mother. 
Over that scene George Eliot wrote: 'In old days 
there were angels who came and took men by the 
hand and led them away from the city of destruction. 
We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men 
are led away from threatening destruction ; a hand is 
put into theirs, which leads them forth gently toward 
a calm and bright land, so that they look no more 
backward; and the hand may be a little child's.' 
Felix Holt, the champion of radicalism, of great 
Gothic head and barbaric shoulders, swerved neither 
to the right nor to the left, unregardful of the solici- 
tations of expediency. Esther Lyon, without much 
knowledge of the world, had to choosejbetween wealth 
and ease on the one hand, and poverty and duty. 
Sorely perplexed by the conditions of her choice, she 
chose rightly when she came to see them clearly. 
Felix and Esther had their reward, if in no other way, 
in that peace of memory which is the basis of hope. 

It was not by mere accident that ' Adam Bede ' and 
'The Origin of Species' appeared in the same year. 
George Eliot, as well as Darwin, is of the great scien- 
tific movement of the nineteenth century. Comte 
built up a system of social and practical ethics, and 
attempted a science of history, taking his analogies 
from the facts of biological science. Taine went a 
step further, and applied the results of Comte's inves- 
tigations to historical criticism. George Eliot took 



250 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

the ethical system of Comte, modified it much by a 
study of the great moralists of the past and present, 
and incorporated her conclusions in the novel. Like 
the scientist, she meant to deal only with phenomena 
and their laws. She takes into her study the Donni- 
thornes, the Titos, and the Lydgates, and applies 
to them the intellectual scalpel and the intellectual 
microscope. V\^ith that keen scalpel of hers she lays 
bare the brain and heart; with that micrbscope 
she examines every nerve vibration; and with a 
trained ear she counts the heart-beats. As Dr. Lyd- 
gate once hoped to do, she ^pierces the. obscurity of 
those minute processes which prepare human misery 
and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the 
first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, 
that delicate poise and transition which determine 
the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness.' Her 
great law of conduct is the act and its consequences. 
Character, in her view, is not fixed ; it is an evolution. 
We have, as it were, two selves. From the one comes 
the voice of duty proclaiming that our salvation lies 
in ^ daring rectitude,' in meeting bravely every circum- 
stance of life; from the other comes the insinuating 
voice of passion and egoism, which if heeded leads the 
deluded spirit on to the city of destruction. Which 
self shall be triumphant rests with ourselves. By our 
deeds we are saved or lost ; by them we create in our 
own hearts an inferno or a paradise. 

George Eliot gave prose-fiction a substance which it 
had never had before among any people. That her 
ethical system has logical inconsistencies we may 
admit. While intending to keep close to empiricism, 
she really admits transcendentalism in what she says 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL 251 

about the inner and better self, and the command of 
duty, which she at least once calls a divine voice. 
Undoubtedly, too, the very greatest of English moral- 
ists was free from conscious systems ; by deep intuition 
he displayed the emotions that sway men to action. 
But there has been only one Shakespeare. When 
systems become antiquated, the work that was reared 
upon them falls. Positivism was antiquated some 
years ago, and evolution has taken its place. George 
Eliot is, however, connected with the theories of her 
time more in appearance than in reality. In her ways 
of thinking, there is less of Comte than of Words- 
worth and Thomas a Kempis, both of whom taught 
renunciation as a command. Between Dante and 
George Eliot there is a suggestive analogy. Dante ex- 
pressed himself in the terms of the grotesque philoso- 
phy of the Middle Age. Thomas Aquinas is no longer 
read, while the fame of Dante increases more and 
more every day. Why ? because the scholasticism 
of St. Thomas is only the vesture of Dante's own 
profound meditations, which each generation for itself 
may translate into its own language. So of George 
Eliot. Her moral discernments, often clothed in the 
language of positivism, are nevertheless imbedded 
everlastingly in the inherited thought of the ages. 
With a precision and a minuteness never possible be- 
fore her time, she worked out the Hebrew formula, 
that they who sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind ; 
which was likewise the Greek idea, that when a wrong 
is done, the Eumenides, daughters of earth and dark- 
ness, will awake from their sleep and avenge it. And 
with the terrible earnestness of ^schylus, she re- 
iterated the tragic corollary : ' We can conceive no 



252 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in 
pulsations of unmerited pain/ 

3. George Meredith 

George Meredith is not a disciple of George Eliot. 
In fact, his first essay in fiction slightly antedates 
hers. ' The Shaving of Shagpat/ a pleasant Oriental 
entertainment, she appreciated for The Westminster 
Review for April, 1856. ' The Ordeal of Eichard 
Feverel,^ George Meredith's first regular novel, ap- 
peared in the same year as '4:^am Bede.' Twelve 
novels, not counting tales, have thus far followed 
' Evan Harrington ' (1861) ; ' Emilia in England ' (1864) 
afterward changed to ' Sandra Belloni ' ; 'Rhoda Flem 
ing' (1865); 'Vittoria' (1867); 'Harry Richmond 
(1871); 'Beauchamp's Career' (1876); 'The Egoist 
(1879); 'The Tragic Comedians' (1880); 'Diana of 
the Crossways ' (1885) ; ' One of our Conquerors ' 
(1890) ; 'Lord Ormont and his Aminta' (1894) ; ' The 
Amazing Marriage ' (1895). 

From the first, George Meredith has been a psy- 
chologist. Thus he writes when well on in ' Richard 
Eeverel ' : ' At present, I am aware, an audience im- 
patient for blood and glory scorns the stress I am put- 
ting on incidents so minute, a picture so little imposing. 
An audience will come to whom it will be given to 
see the elementary machinery at work ; who, as it 
were, from some slight hint of the straws, will feel the 
winds of March when they do not blow.' From this 
passage will be seen how like to George Eliot's con- 
ception of the novel is Meredith's ; only his is subtler 
than hers, for she never asks us to feel the winds of 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL 253 

March when they do not blow. Both deal primarily 
with the invisible life, the events of which they would 
^ render as consequent to your understanding as a 
piece of logic, through an exposure of character.' 
Both have their ^ memorable crises ' — the expression 
is Meredith's as well as George Eliot's ; in both is the 
energizing of the scientific spirit in literature. 

The audience Meredith felt assured of in 1859 has 
hardly come to him, and he seems to allude to the fact 
in the closing paragraph of ' The Amazing Marriage.' 
Why has there been no rush pell-mell toward him ? 
Probably not because of the reason he implies — his 
subject-matter — so much as because of his obscurity. 
There are in his earlier novels passages of unsurpassa- 
ble poetic beauty : Richard and Lucy in the woods by 
the lake; the purification of Richard as nature and 
the storm speak to him ; Wilfrid and Emilia by Wil- 
ming Weir; and most marvellous of all in its rich, 
Oriental luxuriousness, the London scene between 
E-ichard and Mrs. Mount, the enchantress. A master 
of color and melody when he wills, Meredith has 
mostly cast his lot with those who have whimsically 
misused the English language ; he is of the company 
of Sterne, Carlyle, and Browning. He does not speak 
directly, his aim being 'a fantastic delivery of the 
verities ' ; and to be at pleasure utterly unintelligible 
is one of the graces of his style. He began by speak- 
ing through maxims and aphorisms, and he still 
speaks through them. They are not witty sayings 
like Mrs. Poyser's, which give truths in half-lights ; 
they come from the meditation of a phrase-builder ; 
and in them is concentrated his criticism of contem- 
porary life. He says, for example, ^Men may have 



254 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

rounded Seraglio Point ; they have not yet doubled 
Cape Turk/ and leaves it to you to think out what 
he means. He is fond of quaint and finely drawn 
allegory, going so far as to describe a ^ Philosophical 
Geography/ with its E-ubicon and Acheron, which 
stands in the same relation to morals as Scuderi's 
chart to the analysis of love. Even to his fit 
audience, though few, Meredith was for a long time 
perplexing. His purpose was not apparent, and per- 
haps because he himself had not clearly defined to 
himself what he wished to do. The illumination 
came when in 1877 he publisned a lecture in plain 
English, entitled ' On the Idea of Comedy and of the 
Uses of the Comic Spirit.' After-light came from the 
prelude to ' The Egoist ' and the initial chapter of 
* Diana.' Since these prolegomena, there has been no 
sufficient reason for not following Meredith in the main 
drift. ^The Egoist,' which soon followed the essay 
on comedy, is the type of the Meredith novel, con- 
taining all that may be found in the rest, except that 
the poetry, romance, wit, and pathos of some of the 
earlier novels are here held in greater restraint. 

Meredith has given the novel a new heroine. Before 
him three types of woman had prevailed in our fiction. 
The heroine was usually the lady of chivalry. While 
she was in reality the slave of her husband or lover, 
he was ostensibly her worshipper. This lady of the 
castle still exists in our social ideal; and as a conse- 
quence she has stood in the foreground of our fiction. 
In contrast to her, Thackeray placed the rogue of the 
Spanish novel. In the lighter forms of fiction the 
woman of farce was omnipresent, to be pommelled by 
satire, jest, and innuendo. From these three ideals, 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL 255 

there had been some notable breakmgs-away, in Jane 
Austen, Charlotte Bronte, TroUope, and George Eliot. 
In Meredith we have their utter repudiation. His 
women are never rogues, nor are they flawless; they 
are obnoxious to ridicule, and he ridicules them. 
They are always beautiful, because they are healthy. 
They can dance, but they like the open air best ; they 
are lithe of limb; they run and jump, and fall of 
exhaustion; they have fresh faces and they eat well. 
Their heads are furnished with brains and with a 
dislike of losing their identity; they fight for their 
independence and win. If they find it necessary, they 
clip the locks of their lovers and husbands, and aban- 
don them to the Philistines. Then, arm-in-arm with 
the men they love, they proceed to a jolly dance down 
what the world calls ' the halls of madness.' Such is 
the composite portrait of Emilia, Clara, Diana, and 
Aminta. 

Meredith is at war with sentimentalism. This word 
of vague content he defines enigmatically in the first 
chapter of ' Diana ' : ' The sentimental people fiddle 
harmonics on the strings of sensualism, to the delight 
of a world gaping for marvels of musical execution 
rather than for music' Benevolence, kindness, char- 
ity, — all the altruistic virtues, — are sentimentalities, 
unless the heart goes with the act. So too are equally 
self-pity and the ^sham decent.' The present social 
code determining the conduct of sex to sex has its 
foundation in sentimentalism. It has come to us from 
the bepraised age of chivalry, which was the age of 
barbarism. All our nice sexual etiquette is only *a 
fine flower or a pinnacle flame-spire,' starting up from 
sensuality. The best that can be said of it is that the 



256 DEVELOPMENT OE THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

beast veiled is better than the beast uncovered. 
Very severe is Meredith on the folly of those boys 
and girls who meet in the pale moonlight to part 
forever or to swear eternal love. Wilfrid and 
Emilia are sitting by Wilming Weir at evening, and 
this is a piece of their conversation with Meredith's 
comment : — 

' You are my own, are you not, Emilia ? * 

' Yes ; I am,' she answered simply. 

' That water seems to say "for ever," ' he murmured ; and 
Emilia's fingers pressed upon his. 

Of marriage there was no furth^ word. Her heart was 
evidently quite at ease ; and that it should be so without chain- 
ing him to a date, was Wilfrid's peculiar desire. He could 
pledge himself to eternity, but shrank from being bound to 
eleven o'clock on the morrow morning. 

The egoism of Willoughby, in ^ The Egoist,' is one of 
the various manifestations of sentimentalism. It is 
not because of genuine passion that he proposes to 
Constantia Durham and Clara Middleton ; his feeling 
toward them is only a kind of agreeable nerve irritation 
from the presence of fine form and bearing. All his 
talk to Clara about their being all in all to each other 
and their keeping themselves unspotted from the world, 
is the sickly animal speaking in him. So too his de- 
manding of her that she shall be his not only in life 
but in death ; so too his straightening himself up erect 
as the letter I, when it is rumored that he is engaged to 
a widow. Why should not a man marry a widow? 
Meredith would ask. It is a morbid sentiment that 
makes widows unmarketable. The main thing in 
marriage is suitability as common sense points it out : 
in the ideal union husband and wife are ^capital 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL 25T 

comrades/ like Weyburn and Aminta. What is dis- 
agreeable to Meredith is an unhealthy animalism, 
which, however mnch it may stalk behind form, is 
nothing more than bestiality. Are not Meredith's dis- 
cernments true to fact ? Is not sentimentalism born 
of the beast and unreason ? No one can much doubt 
it, who has read the ' Confessions ' of Eousseau. On 
the other hand, says Meredith in substance, the senses 
have their right uses, and reality is of infinite sweet- 
ness. And what are the right uses of the senses ? and 
what is the sweetness of reality ? — these questions 
he has answered in his strong athletic heroines, 
in whom the animal has received the stamp of the 
spirit. 

Though shunning all unsound feeling and self- 
imposed misery, Meredith maintains that there is 
pathos in his novels. He and George Eliot have best 
expressed the new view of tragedy which presided at 
the birth of the modern novel. According to the old 
view, as we have it in our national drama, there can 
be technically no tragedy without at least one violent 
death. To-day we distinguish less mechanically. 
Death in and of itself is no longer tragic. It is tragic 
only in certain circumstances, as when a man falls in 
the midst of worthy labors, or leaves behind him 
children unprotected and unprovided for. On the 
other hand, we see the intensest pathos in life itself ; 
and science has enforced common observation. The 
tragedy is not in the cries of Prometheus bound, 
but in Prometheus not yet bound, says George 
Eliot 5 in ' a solitude of despised ideas,' in ^ the fatal 
pressure of poverty and disease.' Thus the tragedy 
of Dr. Lydgate is not in his death so much as in his 



258 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

failure as a man. The tragedy of Meredith is less 
obvious and less pronounced than George Eliot's. He 
has no inferno through which his characters slip from 
circle to circle, but rather a purgatory through whose 
fires he marches them for their purification. It may be 
that a great social wrong has been committed ; then 
Eichard Feverel must pass through a severe ordeal. 
It may be that a young woman in her ignorance and 
thoughtlessness has promised to marry or has in fact 
married a man for whom she can have no affection ; 
the act must be atoned for, as in the case of Clara and 
Aminta. The tragedy of Mer^ith is almost always 
held in firm barriers, and its darkness is pierced 
by the approach of morning; as in that scene in 
the park when Clara pleads with Willoughby for 
freedom. 

* You are cold, my love ? You shivered. ' 

* I am not cold,' said Clara. ' Some one, I suppose, was 
walking over my grave.' 

The gulf of a caress hove in view like an enormous billow 
hollowing under the curled ridge. 

She stooped to a buttercup ; the monster swept by. 

As in this conversation, the tragedy of situation 
and character with Meredith frequently passes into 
grave comedy. He has written tragi-comedies. The 
sub-title of ^The Egoist' is ^ A Comedy in Narrative.' 
By comedy Meredith does not mean farce and 
gayety, but serious social ridicule on the border-land 
of the tragic and comic states. He makes a very nice 
distinction between humor and comedy. We usually 
roughly class Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, and Thack- 
eray together as humorists. But are not Cervantes 
and Fielding comic writers, and does not professional 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL 259 

humor date from Sterne ? Cervantes and Fielding 
ridicule folly : the former, among many follies, the 
reading of romances of chivalry; the latter, among 
many follies, clean-cut ethical maxims, the conduct of 
contemporary men and women and their education, 
and the presumption of taking as the subject of a 
novel a class of men and women concerning whom 
you are in the densest ignorance. It is a correction 
of manners they aim at in the light of comic con- 
sciousness. Sterne fiddled the harmonics for amuse- 
ment. The cast of Thackeray's mind was that of the 
comic writer. His setting out to correct Dickens, to 
teach him how to write a novel, by making its heroine 
Becky Sharp instead of Little Nell, Meredith would 
call a comic situation. But there is another element 
in Thackeray, which came from Sterne, — a literary 
sentimentalism. This mingling of sentiment and 
comedy is humor ; it lacks, according to Meredith, the 
high seriousness of Fielding ; and its force as a social 
corrective is lost. Comedy he conceives of as a Muse 
watching the actions of men and women, detecting 
and pointing out their inconsistencies with a view to 
their moral improvement. She never laughs aloud, she 
only smiles at most ; and the smile is of the intellect, 
for she is the handmaid of philosophy. For the 
frailties of human nature she has no ridicule, for she 
is no pessimist ; for individual men she has no lash- 
ings, for satire is not comedy. She ^ is impersonal and 
of unrivalled politeness,' occupying herself with the 
unnatural and conventional codes we have built up for 
ourselves, and she leads the way to a higher civiliza- 
tion. She may be called the humor of the mind, in 
distinction from the humor of Sterne and Thackeray, 



260 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

wMch. is the humor of the heart; and the heart is 
sensation and material.^ 

Do yon not experience ^ a tremble of the laughing 
muscles/ Meredith would ask, when you contrast the 
conduct of Willoughby with what it would be, were 
he not in love with himself? He insists on a woman's 
marrying him after she has fled from him ; and will 
release her from the engagement only on condition 
that she shall consent to marry his cousin, with whom 
in his blindness he is not aware she is desperately in 
love. He boasts of the bravery of the Patternes, cit- 
ing as an example of it an actvof heroism performed 
by a Lieutenant Patterne in the navy, and sends him 
a check. When the ^thick-set, stumpy marine' 
makes his appearance at the Hall in a pouring rain, 
without gloves and umbrella, Sir Willoughby is ^ not 
at home.' He would not marry into the aristocracy, 
because ' he doubted the quality of their blood.' The 
woman he marries must swear to be his eternally, for 
he fears that he may die first, and his spirit be har- 
assed by the scandals that pursue widows. He tells 
Clara that he is no poet, and she replies that she has 
not accused him. Should you tell Meredith that his 
comedy is elusive and over finely wrought, he might 
reply, using one of his favorite words, that you are 
obtuse. 

Himself a product of science, Meredith has spoken 
very disrespectfully of her. We went to her, he says, 
for light, and she told us that we are animals. And 

1 While there is much truth in Meredith's contentions, they are 
nevertheless based upon a questionable psychology. It is a fanci- 
ful procedure to detach the intellect from the feelings, and then 
to place it above them. 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL 261 

is there not an element of truth in what he avers? 
The first great scientific discoveries the contempo- 
raries of Comte and Mill welcomed with hopes and 
enthusiasms no longer intelligible ; society in its inner 
life, they thought, was to be revolutionized. Men who 
like Meredith are the connecting links between those 
days and the present have become disillusioned. The 
path taken by science has not been what they supposed 
it would be. Its ends have been mainly practical ; it 
has ministered unto physical comforts ; it has led to 
agnosticism. Not one whit has the spirit within been 
purified and made nobler by it. Egoism, for example, 
in its thousand phases is as rampant now as it was 
fifty years ago. 

* Art,' says Meredith, ' is the specific' He does not 
believe in that form of realism which lays claim to an 
actual transcription of manners. Life is too short for 
that, and nothing is to be gained by it. What, let it 
be asked, is the value of the numerous stories of 
New England and the Tennessee mountains, and of 
all provincial fiction? So far as they are true to 
fact in dialect and local color, they are documents 
for the linguist and the historian. Their value 
as art, beyond a transient amusement, which in 
a decade becomes ennui, depends wholly upon the 
extent they rise from the particular to the general 
and everlasting truths of human consciousness and 
conduct; upon the extent their characters are broad- 
ened by imperceptible gradations from the individual 
to the type, never being quite the one nor quite the 
other. Such types the characters of Meredith have 
been mostly since 'Sandra Belloni.' Not life in its 
wearisome vastness nor a patch of it is his aim, but 



262 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

' a summary ' of it. He works as a philosopher ; he 
mingles with society, and believes that he detects cer- 
tain maladies, and he aims at the artistic presentation 
of them. The malady of men is a primeval egoism in 
their attitude toward women. Consequently many of 
Meredith's men are egoists. His great feminine char- 
acters are also types, and in a measure homologues. 
They are women as they would be if emancipated, 
verging into women as they are, faultily educated and 
hemmed in by historic conventions. Meredith would 
be another Menander or Moliere : he would probe life 
with a clear perception, and, "by pointing out our ab- 
surdities, show us what we are. 



CHAPTER VIII 

The Contemporary Novel 

1. Henry James and Impressionism 

By the contemporary novel is meant the novel of 
the younger generation of writers. George Meredith, 
of the present and the past, has carried on the literary 
tradition of George Eliot. But he belongs essentially 
to a time when science amused itself with broad gen- 
eralizations, when its methods were synthetic rather 
than analytical. Hence his impatience with the course 
of speculation since the advent of Darwin. Science 
has become more and more exact ; injwithering irony 
and sarcasm, it has excluded the so-called spiritual 
from its consideration or has reduced the spiritual to 
the material ; beyond perception it refuses to go ; it has 
found its working hypothesis in the theory of evolution ; 
and as to minor formulas, it proceeds warily. Litera- 
ture has watched science eager for instruction ; it has 
aimed at scientific exactness of perception. Where it 
has not done this, it has, by theory or practice or both, 
insisted that imagination should be subordinated to 
observation. 

The romancer of fifty years ago seated himself in a 
retired nook of England, behind ivied walls and shut- 
tered windows, and described the life and scenery of 
the Spanish main. When raised to competency and 

263 



264 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

leisure by the sale of his books, he visited the places 
he had described, and found them wonderfully like 
what he had seen in his imagination. His descendant 
of to-day does not so. He visits the country he intends 
to illustrate ; he jots down outward characteristics 
and minutiae of manners, customs, dress, and scenery, 
and sets them into some kind of frame, labelling the 
result a novel. In individual instances he has accom- 
panied pilgrims to famous shrines or followed the 
soldier to the battle-field, writing in full detail of all 
he saw. His counterpart is the tourist with a pocket 
camera. Other novelists have'^ade prolonged studies 
of character and manners in some well-defined dis- 
trict. We have novels, and hosts of them, of village 
and town life in England, Scotland, Ireland, New 
England, the South, the West, Australia, India, and 
Africa, written not by men and women who have left 
their homes in search of material. These novelists, 
themselves a part of what they depict, have aimed at 
living cross-sections of life. They have, as it were, 
their specialties, like the scientist, the professional 
man, and the merchant. We read them for informa- 
tion or amusement, pleased to learn how our cousins 
are living in distant places. Though interest in this 
kind of fiction must eventually become local and 
provincial, undoubtedly there are pieces written by 
these specialists that will become classics, just as 
' Cranf ord ' has already become a classic. 

From this universal realism has issued — under the 
influence of Ivan Turgenev and Alphonse Daudet — 
an artistic presentation of the matter of real life often 
called impressionism, of which one of the exponents 
in criticism and fiction is Henry James. ^A novel/ 



THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 265 

he has said, ' is in its broadest definition a personal, a 
direct impression of life : that, to begin with, consti- 
tutes its value, which is greater or less according to 
the intensity of the impression.' ^ He describes only 
what he sees, but not all that he sees. The following 
from the ' Tragic Muse ' (1890) is what is seen at a 
glance: *What Biddy discerned was that this young 
man was fair and fat and of the middle stature ; he 
had a round face and a short beard, and on his crown 
a mere reminiscence of hair, as the fact that he car- 
ried his hat in his hand permitted it to be observed.' 
And speaking of the women with this man, Biddy 
says: ^One of them was an old lady with a shawl; 
that was the most salient way in which she pre- 
sented herself.' This is not photography, which, 
making no distinction between one detail and another, 
gives a crude impression of them all ; it is art. Out 
of a possible multitude of details, James selects the 
striking or significant pose and incident. Moreover, 
he ' strains the visual sense ' that he may observe 
nuances the camera refuses- to reproduce, laying claim 
to a superior faculty of perception. When we read 
Howells we wonder that we have not seen in the com- 
monplace what he sees. In the case of James, we 
wonder that there is so much to be seen ; and ques- 
tion whether what he sees is really there. For ex- 
ample, the Tragic Muse has wretchedly failed in her 
first performance. One of the spectators nevertheless 
still believes in her : — 

He remained conscious that something surmounted and 
survived her failure, something that would perhaps be worth 

1 ' The Art of Fiction,' in ' Partial Portraits,' London and New 
York, 1888. 



266 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

taking hold of. It was the element of outline and attitude, the 
way she stood, the way she turned her eyes, her head, and 
moved her limbs. These things held the attention ; they had a 
natural felicity and, in spite of their suggesting too much the 
school-girl in the tableau-vivant, a sort of grandeur. Her face, 
moreover, grew as he watched it ; something delicate dawned 
in it, a dim promise of variety and a touching plea for patience, 
as if it were conscious of being able to show in time more 
expressions than the simple and striking gloom, which, as yet, 
had mainly graced it. In short, the plastic quality of her per- 
son was the only definite sign of a vocation. 

From this passage it will be ^served that James 
looks at the externals of life through the eyes of the 
connoisseur of the fine arts, particularly of painting. 
As here his language is that of the studio; his most 
repeated words being, outline, color, style, form, and 
plastic fact. The impressionist is also a psychologist. 
George Eliot begins with inner states and inner events 
and works her way outward ; sometimes never reach- 
ing the surface at all, as in the eleventh chapter of ^ De- 
ronda,' where she records parenthetically the thoughts 
of Gwendolen and Grandcourt, in the pauses of their 
first conversation. James begins on the outside and 
passes a little way beneath appearance, reading char- 
acter through feature and movement of eyes, head, 
and limb. It is the manner of Eichardson, to which 
is added the trained perception that has come with 
science. 

James is inclined to play with the stern analysis of 
George Eliot. He evidently thinks that the ^crisis* 
has been overdone ; and he would call attention to the 
fact that our conduct in the so-called ^sacramental 
moments ' often leaves no visible trace. It is not 
customary with him to round off his plots; whether 



THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 267 

the novel is long or short, it is an episode. Men and 
women meet, have their tender experiences, and then 
go their way. Nothing happens in his novels, the 
critics used to say. The marriage expected in the 
last chapter does not take place; if the young man 
and young woman marry at all, it is to some one else. 
This apparent incompleteness originated among the 
modern realists in an attempt to correlate literature 
more closely with life as it is. But in the view of the 
impressionist there is no incompleteness; rather a 
higher morality than in the old novel, where virtue 
was rewarded and villany punished. 'The moral 
sense and the artistic sense,' James has written, 'lie 
very close together.' ^ In ' The Tragic Muse,' a por- 
trait painter would marry an ambitious woman-politi- 
cian; and a diplomat would marry an actress. James 
does not allow these events to happen. He marries 
the actress to a third-rate actor, and leaves the rest of 
his characters unmarried. For him to do otherwise 
would be insincere art, just as in reaTlife a marriage 
between a man and woman having no common fund of 
ideas would be an immoral act. We should stick to 
the career nature seems to have marked out for us, 
accept the conditions, and struggle on to the end. 

Though the impressionists have written novels of 
all lengths, they have chiefly cultivated the short- 
story. Short stories have been frequent in our litera- 
ture ever since the Eenaissance. Under the name of 
tracts they were given a wide circulation by Hannah 
More, a hundred years ago. A large number were 
written by Maria Edge worth, and several by Irving. 
They received great encouragement in the middle of 

1 ' The Art of Fiction.' 



268 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

this century from the editors of magazines. They 
were beautifully wrought by Poe and Hawthorne, 
who first gave them a style and an art of their own. 
As written by Poe and Hawthorne, they were usually 
brief narratives, best designated as short tales. More 
recent writers have considerably enlarged the means 
of procedure; sometimes they make use of narrative, 
but more frequently of dialogue, and there are ex- 
amples of the ingenious management of letters. On 
the subject Professor Brander Matthews has written 
a philosophical essay,^ in which he claims for the re- 
cent short-story the right of being a distinct species of 
the novel. It is to the regular novel, according to him, 
what the lyric is to the epic ; j± is, in his words, ^ a 
high and difficult department of fiction,' because of 
the extreme concision required and the inelastic laws 
that govern it. Like the sonnet, it must be a unit, 
giving expression to one emotion or a series of emo- 
tions possessing a unity of tone; its characters must 
be few; its action must be simple; it tells some- 
thing, but it suggests more. It satisfies a large body 
of readers who do not have time to look at things 
long or steadfastly. What is wanted is a momentary 
impression of them, artistically delivered. 

2. Philosophical Realism: Mrs. Humphry Ward and 
Thomas Hardy 

While Henry James has been weaving a delicate psy- 
chological tissue, Mrs. Humphry Ward has held to 
the firmer texture of the old-time novel. Like George 

1 ' The Philosophy of the Short-Story,' in ' Pen and Ink,' New 
York and London, 1888. 



THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 26d 

Eliot, she has assimilated something of Wordsworth 
and Dante. She feels the weight of chance desires, 
and seeks refuge in the voice of duty. In the intense 
phrases of the ^ Divine Comedy ' she finds a natural 
vent to her spiritual moods. But between * Middle- 
march ^ and ' Eobert Elsmere ' (1888) is sixteen years. 
During this period the world of thought and specula- 
tion moved rapidly and far; and social theories took 
new and strange forms. Mrs. Ward has reflected 
these changes. George Eliot, though an agnostic, 
had, in common with others of her time, scruples 
against propagandism, as if she did not fully trust 
the conclusions of her intellect. Not so Mrs. Ward. 
She refashions the church on Christ as a human ideal, 
placing the Church of England by the side of ^the 
Brotherhood of Jesus,' in the spirit of criticism and 
proselytism. She delves in Christian origins, scruti- 
nizing and weighing testimony with the confidence of 
her uncle Matthew Arnold, who re-wrote the Bible on 
his own lines. George Eliot's altruistic ethical for- 
mula was general in application, having a bearing 
upon conduct in all circumstances. Mrs. Ward, in a 
like altruistic manner, expounds what she calls indus- 
trial ethics. She takes up, as in ' Marcella,' contem- 
porary social theories, criticises them, shows whither 
they lead, and comes forward with a solution of her 
own, which is a via media. The compass of her work 
has increased with each successive novel, until in 
* Helbeck of Bannisdale ' she has depicted the spiritual 
struggle of a devout Catholic in contact with modern 
unbelief. Everything she does is wrought at a high 
emotional pitch, where there is no temptation to laugh 
or even smile at absurdities. 



270 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Mrs. Ward is the inspirer of a popular group of 
novelists who have turned to current speculations for 
the purposes of open didacticism. They have dis- 
cussed class distinctions, agrarian reforms, the intri- 
cate problems of labor and capital, the theory and 
practice of municipal government, etc. ; and most 
sensationally, the social enfranchisement of woman, 
the failure of marriage, and the grounds for divorce. 
Like the revolutionary novelists at the close of the 
eighteenth century, they have embellished the politi- 
cal treatise for people who would not read it without 
the story of passion. Into their work has crept 
once more the humanitarian motive, and, as a few 
years will make clear, a sentimental note very like 
Eousseau's. 

As science proceeds by experiment, which has been 
defined as ^provoked observation,' the novelist has 
asked. Why cannot literature do likewise? It is in 
France that the experimental novel first received its 
apotheosis. In 1869, Emile Zola wrote the ' Fortune 
des Rougon' (published in book form in 1871), the 
first of a long series of novels bearing the general 
title, ' Les Eougon-Macquart, histoire naturelle et so- 
ciale d'une Famille sous le second Empire ' ; the series 
closed in 1893, with ' Docteur Pascal.' In his critical 
writings ^ during the decade 1880-90, Zola formulated 
the body of principles which should govern the ^ natu- 
ralist' or the 'experimental novelist.' The story as 
groundwork of the novel must never be invented out 
of one's head ; it must be taken from direct observa- 
tion, the newspaper, or some well-authenticated report ; 

1 ' Le Roman Experimental ' (1880) : English translation, B. M 
Sherman, London and New York, 1893. 



THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 271 

it must be a piece of life itself. For example, it may- 
be supposed that Zola reads of a young woman who, 
when about to leap into the Seine, is rescued by the 
police. He has an interview with her, finds out all 
he can about her, the surroundings under which she 
has grown up, and the character and occupation of her 
parents. He studies similar cases, let us say ten or 
twelve ; then he makes his generalization, maintaining 
that for a given set of environing and hereditary con- 
ditions, there is only one issue. To him there is no 
uncertain quantity in the problem; he takes no ac- 
count of a mysterious element in human nature, which 
may rise and assert itself, for to do so would not be 
scientific. He is now ready to write his debdde. In 
any single novel of Zola's, it is the visible environ- 
ment that appears most to determine the outcome; 
but read three or four of his novels as they fall 
chronologically in the series, and it will be seen 
that he has also sought to treat the other determining 
force, character passing from generation to generation. 
Certain corollaries follow from his method. There 
is no artificial shufi&ing in the last 'chapter, no revo- 
lution of fortune, no happy marriages, no unexpected 
inheritances, the climax is inevitable, for it is marked 
out by nature. The author should never let his feel- 
ings interfere to turn events into a fantastic channel ; 
he should not assume the rdle of wit or humorist, — 
life is too serious for that ; he should speak as a sci- 
entist, telling precisely what he observes. 

The difference between this so-called naturalism and 
the older realism may be illustrated by a criticism 
of some of our realists from the naturalistic point 
of view. Fielding, as has been remarked, had 



272 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

th.e naturalist's situation in ^Amelia/ a woman of 
some rank married to a gambling lieutenant who is 
unable to support her and her children. The issue 
nature has fixed ; but Fielding, taking things into his 
own hand, disturbs the logic of events that the story- 
may end pleasantly. The material Dickens worked 
is of superlative naturalistic quality. For example, the 
episode of Stephen Blackpool in 'Hard Times' pos- 
sesses the inherent possibilities of Zola's ^L'Assom- 
moir ' or Hardy's ' Jude the Obscure.' The dissipated 
wife, the ruined home, and the hard-laboring husband 
are all there. Dickens, however, lights up his dark 
picture with sublime suffering, which the naturalists 
regard as a sham. Thackeray, when he should speak 
out plainly about Becky Sharp, hedges and becomes 
silent. Of the fiction of the last generation, 'Mid- 
dlemarch' comes nearest to the experimental novel. 
George Eliot describes briefly the career of Dr. Lyd- 
gate as student, places him in a midland town, and 
then tells how he behaves. The determining forces 
of his conduct are, accordingly, his antecedents and 
his environment, plus an unexplainable personality. 
This is not satisfactory to the naturalists. They 
would eliminate every vestige of freedom whereby an 
individual becomes responsible for his acts. Natural- 
ism is thus determinism. 

Of philosophical realism of the kind just described, 
Thomas Hardy is the best English representative. 
Born in Dorsetshire, he has studied closely the peas- 
ant life of his native shire and those neighboring 
counties which together comprised the ancient king- 
dom of Wessex. Why he has left the madding crowd 
for the country folk, he explained in an essay pub- 



THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 273 

lished in The Forum for March, 1888. Writing the 
common language of his brotherhood, — equally well 
understood in England, Erance, Germany, and Scan- 
dinavia, — he says that the conduct of the upper 
classes is screened by conventions, and thus the real 
character is not easily seen ; and if it is seen, it must 
be portrayed subjectively: whereas in the lower 
walks, conduct is a direct expression of the inner life ; 
and thus character can be directly portrayed through 
the act. ' In the one case the author's word has to be 
taken as to the nerves and muscles of his figures ; in 
the other they can be seen as in an ecorche.' From 
their views on the question of style, the naturalists 
fall into two general classes. There are the extrem- 
ists who — like Aristotle, the practical realist of an- 
tiquity — let style look out for itself, on the ground 
that any attention to it would result in a rhetorical 
misrepresentation of fact. And there are the poets 
who clothe the disagreeable narrative in the most 
pleasing language at command. To the latter class 
Hardy has the most afiinity. The choice of words 
and the arrangement of them in and for themselves, 
he does not believe in. His aim is at an exact and 
felicitous expression of his ideas and emotions; and 
the first principle that he lays down to this end is the 
' lucid order ' of Horace. Style in this high sense he 
would do his little toward bringing to ultimate per- 
fection. When completed the novel should give, on 
account of the harmony of the subject-matter and its 
treatment, an aesthetic pleasure similar to that derived 
from a fine painting. 

Hardy struck the note of the newer realism in *A 
Pair of Blue Eyes' (1873), which is a lament, not 



2T4 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

without much cynicism, over the clash of circum- 
stance and individual effort. In *The Return of the 
Native ' (1878) is magnificently expressed his love of 
the dark and sinister in nature, and his feeling of the 
nothingness of human life in the presence of the ever- 
lasting heath. Here he began to speak of physical 
beauty — the face without its lines of care — as an 
anachronism, of life as ' a thing to be put up with,' of 
*the defects of natural laws,' and ^the quandary that 
man is in by their operation.' In ' Tess of the D'Ur- 
bervilles ' (1891), he gave freer utterance to the same 
mood, which had now become more intense. In ' Jude 
the Obscure ' (1895), he threw off every semblance of 
restraint, writing a novel tha^his earlier admirers 
were unable to read. 

<Tess of the D'Urbervilles,' his mightiest produc- 
tion, is a tragedy that at no period in our history 
other than these Jin de siMe days could have been 
written ; or, if written, could have been understood. 
And what is its novelty ? Surely it is not the sub- 
ject-matter, for recall ' Clarissa Harlowe ' and ^ Adam 
Bede.' It has been a tacit assumption in English 
tragedy that the dramatic hero must commit some 
deed from which he suffers. The deed may be a 
crime, as in ^ Macbeth ' ; it may issue from a fault in 
judgment, as in the case of Brutus, or from a stubborn 
vanity, as in the case of Lear. That there are likely 
to be innocent victims of the deed may be admitted, 
and therein lies the deeper pathos of Shakespear- 
ean tragedy. The way George Eliot, somewhat like 
Shakespeare, traced the events of her sombre novels 
to free individual acts of will we have elaborated. 
The tragedy of *Tess of the D'Urbervilles' begins 



THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 275 

in a crime and ends in a crime; Alec pays the 
penalty for his misdeeds. But Alec is only a subor- 
dinate character. Tess is the main and central char- 
acter, who, from first to last, Hardy insists, is free 
from any wrong-doing. In this reversal of the tradi- 
tions of tragedy both in our drama and our novel, 
Hardy is an innovator. 

Tess stands in isolated weakness. She has a con- 
science and a will that may possibly be called her 
own, but against her are her father and mother. Alec, 
Angel, a conventional society, nature, hereditary ten- 
dencies, and a malicious course of events. With what 
happens to her she has nothing to do. In forced 
obedience to her parents she goes to Trantridge, the 
home of the spurious D'Urbervilles. The smutching 
of her innocence there is an act of treachery, for which 
she is in no wise responsible. Her love for Angel 
Clare, which results in the ill-starred marriage, is the 
working in her of a cruel law of nature, against which 
she struggles in vain. She returns to Alec to save 
her mother, brothers, and sisters from starvation. If 
it be said that at this point in her career there is a 
relaxation of will. Hardy has anticipated the remark 
by suggesting that her weakness is in part inherited, 
and in part the product of the enervating climate in 
which she has grown up. She puts a knife into the heart 
of Alec. Even this act is outside her normal character, 
for when herself she could not hurt a fly or a worm, 
and she wept at the sight of a bird in its cage ; to it 
she was led by an ' obscure strain in the D'Urberville 
blood.' By her death she atones not for her own 
crimes, but for those of her race; for wrongs, to 
paraphrase Hardy, that her mailed ancestors, rollick- 



276 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

ing home from frays, had dealt upoa peasant girls, 
say, back in the reign of King Stephen. Likewise 
the conduct of Angel Clare finds its explanation 
mostly in heredity. From the Evangelicism of his 
parents he had broken away, and taken refuge in 
Greek paganism ; but when the crisis came, the ^ creed 
of mysticism ' rose to the surface and became master. 
That inherited subconsciousness he succeeded in still- 
ing only by his sojourn in Brazil. 

In harmony with Hardy's view of character as the 
resultant of heredity and environment, is his notion of 
events that lie outside and beyond us ; of happenings, 
chance, fortune. The Immortals would appear to have 
become enraged at Tess, and to have predestined her 
hard career. At the very threkliold of life she meets 
the wrong man. A few days before she marries Angel 
Clare, she pushes under the door of his bedroom a 
written confession, which slips out of sight under the 
carpet, where it remains concealed until found by 
Tess on the wedding morning. On a Sunday, Tess 
tramps fifteen miles to the parsonage of the elder 
Clare to seek protection;, there is no answer to her 
ring at the door, for the family is at church. At just 
the wrong time she now stumbles upon Alec once 
more. A letter she despatches to Angel in Brazil 
is delayed, and he reaches home a few days too late. 
This ironical arrangement of events. Hardy declares 
to be ^a true sequence of things,' and asks, with a 
thrust at V^ordsworth : Wherein can be seen ^ Nature's 
holy plan ' ? Wherein a beneficent Providence ? And 
coming to the prime events, he inquires : Why was 
Tess born ? where are ' the clouds of glory ' ? 'To her 
and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading 



THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 277 

personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in 
the result seemed to justify, and at best could only 
palliate.' This is the pessimism associated with the 
names of Leopardi and Schopenhauer. It is not 
within the province of literary criticism to argue either 
for or against it as a philosophical tenet. In the fer- 
ment of ideas in these closing dsijs of the century, in 
our hasty adjustment of the new conceptions of science 
and experimental philosophy to life, pessimism has 
been accepted by millions either openly or tacitly. 
With an immense audience, Germanic, Latin, and 
Slav, Hardy is in perfect agreement. 

On the other hand, he is out of joint with the codes 
of conduct sanctioned by a Christian civilization. His 
cynical thrusts at Sunday-school teachers and well- 
intentioned gentlemen in black we must pass by. By 
prolonged observation of the country folk, where the 
heart is less concealed than among the great, he has 
come to the conclusion that they are still pagan, as in 
the days when their ancestors worshipped Thor and 
Odin. On one occasion Tess hums the Benedicite, and 
finds in it rest and consolation. Haxdy tells why : it 
is ^ a Pantheistic utterance in a Monotheistic falsetto.' 
He watches the sun break through the August mists; 
and says : ' The sun, on account of the mist, had a 
curious sentient, personal look, demanding the mascu- 
line pronoun for its adequate expression. His present 
aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in 
the scene, explained the old-time heliolatries in a mo- 
ment. One could feel that a saner religion had never 
prevailed under the sun.' Agnosticism he apparently 
welcomes, for if it is not a return to sun-worship, it is 
a blow struck at 'theolatry.' The novel is throughout 



278 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

pagan in tone ; and its paganism climbs to its height 
in the impressive scenes of the closing chapters, where 
Tess rises at daybreak from a fallen altar of a Druidic 
temple, to be conducted to a cathedral city for trial 
and death. 

Quite as important to Hardy's drama as the actors, 
are nature and all external objects. That intimate 
relationship with things as personalities, which older 
civilizations felt and which is possessed by children, 
Hardy has preserved. His scenes he does not de- 
scribe; he makes one acquainted with them, as 
if he were introducing his friends. Seasons — he 
says, to paraphrase him slightly — have their moods ; 
morning and evening, night and noon, have their tem- 
peraments ; winds, trees, waters, clouds, silences, and 
constellations have their dispositions; and all speak 
in voices audible to the spirit. To Tess of Marlott, a 
sudden gust of wind through the roadside trees and 
hedges on a starlit night is ^ the sigh of some immense 
sad soul, conterminous with the universe in space, 
and with history in time.' Upon Tess of the Var Val- 
ley, the trees look down with inquisitive eyes,' and 
the river reproaches her for living. As she moves 
through the meadows in the morning light, her head 
emerging from the low-lying mists, she is to Angel 
Clare the Magdalen, or Artemis, or Demeter. A rough 
table-land at evening is ^Cybele the Many-breasted' 
reclining with outstretched limbs. Salisbury plain at 
the approach of morning is a mighty being waking 
from sleep. In one great scene clothing is made sensi- 
ble to the steadfast gaze, and in one still greater, even 
furniture is endowed with life. Thus marvellously 
Hardy interprets the external world through the moods 



THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 279 

of his characters. This manner has been condemned 
by E-uskin as fallacious, because of the conceits to 
which it leads. But it has the authority of Coleridge 
and Milton. And as managed by Hardy, things about 
his characters become a substitute for the Greek chorus 
of ancient counsellors and warriors sharing in the 
tragedy and commenting upon it, as it moves on, 
under the guidance of the Eates, to the certain dis- 
aster. 

Any criticism of Hardy must be based on first prin- 
ciples, for it is impossible to question his fine work- 
manship. To him literary art owes a debt which at 
some time will be more highly appreciated than it is 
now. But he and the other philosophic realists since 
George Eliot have all failed to see the important dis- 
tinction between science and literature. It may be 
granted that, so far as science can throw any light on 
the subject, our conduct is determined for us. And yet 
there is a voice from the depths of consciousness which 
says this is not the whole truth. Human nature is not 
comprehended by formulas and theorems. Whatever 
may be our speculative beliefs, we alLbehave as if we 
were in a measure free, and responsible for our acts. 
And so has literature thus far usually represented us. 
True, our novelists since Eichardson have been dis- 
posed to call attention to restraining forces from the 
outside; and for that very reason the novel has ex- 
pressed the modern view of conduct better than the 
drama has yet been able to do. Nevertheless, Eichard- 
son, Eielding, and George Eliot left indefinite the 
boundary line between freedom and restraint. Like 
Shakespeare and Milton before them, they did not at- 
tempt to give a fixed denotation to the words fate, doom. 



280 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

fortune, and Provideyice, any more than any one does in 
the language of common speech. Probably literature 
will have to let the matter rest where the greatest of 
the past were contented to let it rest. Toward the 
close of the last century a group of novelists experi- 
mented with determinism ; the reading public revolted, 
and turned to the Gothic romance and then to Scott 
and Cooper. Something very like this, in a smaller 
way perhaps, is happening to-day. 

3. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Revival of Romance 

During the long period of realism from * Pickwick' 
to ^Tess,' the spirit of roman^, as is evident from 
our narrative, was not dead. Some of her old lovers, 
Harrison Ainsworth and James Grant, lived on and 
kept writing down to 1880. Charles Reade was un- 
certain whether he was a realist or a romancer, and so 
he called ^ The Cloister and the Hearth ' ^ a matter- 
of-fact romance.' George Eliot's Gwendolen Harleth 
^in seargreen robes and silver ornaments, with a pale 
sea-green feather fastened in silver, falling backwards 
over her green hat and light brown hair,' is a serpent 
wrought in the full details of Keats and the mediaeval 
allegorists. But these are survivals. Forty-odd years 
ago, modern spiritualism gave rise to a literature 
dealing with the night side of nature. A chair steal- 
ing to the side of the story-teller as he sits by the 
fireplace smoking his evening jJipe; the patter of 
invisible feet on the stairway as he mounts to his 
chamber ; and a materialized spirit or two standing at 
the foot of the four-poster as he lies awake listening 
to the faint ticking of his watch, which in a moment 



THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 281 

is silent and in another drops from its resting-place 
with a thud to the floor — such were some of the cur- 
rent incidents. And in these latter days, romance 
has fed on the reports of the Society for Psychical 
Research. Of this pseudo-spiritualism, the classic is 
Bulwer-Lytton's 'Haunted and the Haunters' (Black- 
wood's Magazine, 1860). 

The novel of crime has also found out new 
sources of horror, and its popular writer for above 
thirty years was Wilkie Collins. The quality of 
his work is well represented in miniature by 'A 
Terribly Strange Bed,' whose heavy tester slowly 
sinks down to smother the sleeper. He won his 
great popularity by * The Woman in White ' (1860) ; 
and thereafter novel after novel of the same kind 
followed, one of the best being ' The Moonstone ' 
(1868). He always had a good story, which was 
a mystification so adroitly put together that the 
secret lay beyond guess to the end. It was he who 
handed over the detective story from Poe to the 
author of ' Sherlock Holmes.' Some thirty years ago 
began to be common the romance of science ; the pur- 
pose of which was to decorate the most showy sci- 
entific discoveries. Examples of this kind of roman- 
cing are ' Elsie Venner ' (1861), ' a medicated novel ' by 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Bulwer-Lytton's 'Coming 
Eace ' (1871), in which was set forth the Utopia of an 
age of electricity. Bulwer's romance was also mildly 
socialistic; and as the facts of science became more 
and more trite, it was this socialistic phase that in 
a few years appeared the most striking. Witness 
'Looking Backward' (1888), by Edward Bellamy, 
which was taken seriously by the reformers and at 



282 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

length by the author himself. In 1869 R. D. Black- 
more published ' Lorna Doone,' the first of his many 
similar picturesque fictions in rhythmic prose. More 
gorgeous still are the romances of William Black, of 
which ' A Princess of Thule ' (1873) tells a pathetic 
love idyl of the Hebrides. In the eighties, H. Rider 
Haggard revived the marvels of the East. Though of 
singularly slight literary value, his fictions served as 
an antidote to the surfeit of realism. The real initia- 
tor of what is most beautiful and lovely in contempo- 
rary romance was William Morris. He wrote tales 
in verse, in prose, and in verse and prose commingled, 
and all in a simple and entrancing manner. Away 
from the stressful burdens of i!rodern civilization, he 
directed the imagination back to the time when 
* Geoffrey Chaucer's pen moved over bills of lading,' 
and thence to the Icelandic sagas. In these epochs, 
he discovered an earthly paradise beside ^ a nameless 
city in a distant sea.' 

The romancer who has won the affections of the 
present generation, both old and young, is Robert 
Louis Stevenson. Blackmore has appealed to youth 
at the sentimental stage. Morris has addressed the 
sesthetic sensibilities of the scholar who delights in 
hearing deliciously retold the old stories of Ogier the 
Dane and Sigurd the Volsung. Stevenson with a 
middle flight has reached both the scholar and the 
general reader. Women only has he failed to please ; 
and there is good reason for this; for with love as a 
motive he dealt charily. It is true that love romance is 
present in many of his novels, in ' Prince Otto,' ^ The 
Master of Ballantrae,' ^ David Balfour,' and ^ St. Ives ' ; 
and he finally came to the conclusion that it is ' the 



THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 283 

everlasting fountain of interest/ But love was not 
with Stevenson of prime consideration ; adventure does 
not flow from it as the sole source, as in the case of 
^ Lorna Doone/ In the two romantic tales by which 
he brought his name before the public, ^Treasure 
Island' (1883) and ^Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' (1886), 
there is no love-making at all. What he did at first — 
and this is one of his innovations — was to awaken 
delight in adventure for its own sake, just as Defoe 
did. Chance and Circumstance which to the philoso- 
phers are at best unlovely, he writes with initial 
capitals, and says they are the divinities whom he 
adores. Events, which Hardy marshals so that they 
seem endowed with spite and cruelty, Stevenson made 
sing together as the morning stars. His gentlemen 
are always lucky, escaping from duels and wrecks with 
flesh wounds and a little wetting and hunger. As 
occasion demands, many subordinate characters are 
shot, or walk the plank, or sink into quicksands ; but 
they are cowards or pirates whom no one is troubled 
to see disappear. 

In fact, the incidents which Stevenson created, fol- 
lowing in the footsteps of Scott, Dumas, Poe, and 
Borrow, are to an extent outside the realm of the 
moral law. He wrote an essay defending the ^ a-moral ' 
in art, that is, art which is neither moral nor immoral, 
but neutral — art which aims at the imaginative pres- 
entation of crime and adventure, and then looks upon 
its task as done. He makes a voyage along the 
Sambre and the Oise in a canoe as graceful as a 
violin ; he crosses the Cevennes prodding a whimsical 
donkey which bears his luggage, and sleeping in a sack 
on the cold uplands under the light of the stars. He 



284 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

is captured by pirates, whose captain with black, curly 
whiskers he sends below, and raises the Jolly Roger 
on his own account. He is wrecked off the coast of 
Mull, and traverses the Highlands with an outlaw, 
dodging the king's troops. He enters out-of-the-way 
places in London and Paris which the police leave 
undisturbed, and from his explorations there he fash- 
ions new Arabian Nights. Most of all he goes in 
quest of hidden treasure, digging in an old monastery, 
diving into the deep sea, or sailing the Spanish main 
with a mutinous crew. What civilization most cares 
for is discarded, — ease, luxuries, and soft beds. And 
though his characters are so often after gold, yet their 
love of it is only a pretence to adventure ; when they 
get it, they squander it or force it upon a chance 
acquaintance to whom they are indebted for a night's 
lodging or some trivial kindness. Stevenson was thus 
in all he wrote a boy, delighting in wild incident in 
and for itself; and he sought to set us back into our 
boyhood, when the moral sense was ill trained and 
we viewed nature naively. Stevenson (if it be per- 
mitted to read between the lines), when he stood in 
a broad highway swept white in the distance by the 
sunlight, thought of Dick Turpin and the exciting 
ride from London to York; when he went down to 
the sea, he saw to the westward the phantom ship 
of Kidd, and heard the ruffian crew calling to him 
over the water ; when he felt his isolation, he could 
fancy himself going out on a star-lit night and shout- 
ing through his hands to the heavens peopled with 
his silent friends. 

Stevenson was not of those who argue that if a man 
has something to say, he will necessarily say it well. 



THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 285 

There are awkward ways of telling a story, and there 
are right ways. Stevenson always hit upon one of 
the right ways. A common convention of fiction 
since Fielding has been that the reader shall admit 
without question the ubiquity of the novelist. But 
Stevenson, with some exceptions, held to a point 
of view. He puts his narrative into the mouth of a 
character, sometimes a minor one, and permits him 
to speak of only what he himself has seen and expe- 
rienced. It was furthermore his custom when the 
story possessed considerable length to let it be told 
by two or more persons, each relating a part. This 
is the method adopted in 'Treasure Island,' 'Dr. 
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' and with most cleverness in 
the ' Master of Ballantrae.' In this last case the story 
is in the hands of the faithful old steward Mackellar, 
who is a sort of editor and glosser. He tells what he 
knows personally of the Ballantrae tragedy; and to 
complete it, he breaks his narrative with long quo- 
tations from the memoirs of Chevalier Burke. Wher- 
ever he wished to do so, Stevenson didnot hesitate to 
employ the special relation ; that is, when a new char- 
acter is introduced he may give, if he likes, an account 
of himself. Stevenson thus passed by the structural 
art of our greatest novelists and went back to Smollett 
and Defoe. He showed that the old episode, which 
was once so abused, is susceptible of a treatment that 
will please ; that the critics since Aristotle who have 
condemned it were mistaken. By the use of it he was 
able to keep his main characters directly before the 
reader with no more effort than is apparent among 
those who have discarded it as loose art. For example, 
in ' Treasure Island ' Jim Hawkins is always the hero, 



286 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

whether he or the Doctor relates what happened on 
that memorable voyage of the Hispaniola} 

Admirable as the structure of Stevenson's stories is 
his style. His syntax is of studied simplicity. His 
sentences are short clauses in coordinate relation, 
separated by semicolons and connected by and or hut^ 
expressed or implied, as he wishes quick or slow 
movement. Involved complex sentences he never 
wrote ; his subordinate clauses are short, and are fre- 
quently dropped into the sentence within parentheses. 
In this way he gained compactness, an even flow, and 
a delightful rhythm. Quaint and smooth-sounding 
words were to him beautiful for themselves. He 
seems to have culled them from his reading of our 
classic literature, and to have stored them away in 
his memory, an exhaustless repository from which he 
could draw at pleasure for the formation of new and 
felicitous phrases. His prototype in our prose litera- 
ture is Sir Thomas Browne. 

The supremacy of Stevenson as a stylist in recent 
fiction his harshest critics have not denied him. But 
then, it is said, there is not much substance behind 
the dress. Those who speak thus must have in 
mind the novel that solves all social and religious 
problems. There is as much substance behind his 
style as behind that of any other English romancer. 
He was certainly not consistent with the dictum 
that romance should be ^a-moral.' In 'A Chapter 
on Dreams,' he gave with special reference to ^ Dr. 

1 For the way former novelists frequently managed the point of 
view in narration, see the opening chapter of * David Copperfield,' 
in which the hero relates verbatim conversations that took place 
before he was born. 



THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 287 

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ' the genesis of mucli of his writ- 
ing. Certain incidents and situations came to him in 
dreams, which he playfully ascribed to the wayward 
brownies. Erom elf-land hints of this kind he built 
up his stories when awake, himself laying claim only 
to the characters and the morality. Almost every- 
where in Stevenson's work there is this duality. 
There are the incidents of pure romance, and there 
are the ethics. As a man Stevenson was a Puritan ; as 
an artist he was a Bohemian. He wrote an essay on 
Franqois Villon, in which he did scant justice to the 
author of ^A Ballad of Dead Ladies.' He wrote a 
story with Villon as hero, and was in full sesthetic 
sympathy with the instinct for housebreaking and 
stealing gold flagons. 

Just as he possessed two selves, so he was pleased, 
as both artist and man, with the two selves of the 
psychologists. This notion of a double selfhood is 
at the basis of ^ Markheim,' ^ The Treasure of Fran- 
chard,' ^Prince Otto,' and ^Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.' 
Sometimes the evil self wins and somejimes the better. 
The problem of ^ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ' is exactly 
that of George Eliot's novels. A man plays with his 
lower self whimsically, and finally falls under its com- 
plete thraldom. At first to do ill is voluntary ; in the 
course of time it becomes involuntary. The point of 
difference is this: George Eliot treats the subject 
directly and analytically ; Stevenson treats it romanti- 
cally and picturesquely, making use of an effervescing 
liquor, under the influence of which the good doctor 
shrivels up so that his clothes are too big for him. 
The method of George Eliot may be more convincing 
than Stevenson's j but the uncompromising ethics are 



288 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

in Stevenson for all that. Even such stories as ^ The 
Dynamiter ' and ^ The Suicide Club ' have their appli- 
cation to society ; for they are fantastic satires on the 
Irish hero and the sentimental pessimist. Stevenson's 
art is thus always human. With rare exceptions there 
is audible in it a lyrical note. At times it is a soft 
fluting; then again it rises to a reflective longing 
for what might have been, as in ' Will o' the Mill ' j 
and sometimes it breaks out in an appeal to the stars 
for ^ tolerance and counsel.' 

To Stevenson more than to any one else we owe 
the recrudescence of the historical romance. His 
treatment of history was mostly in the spirit of 
adventure after the way of Dumas rather than 
after the way of Scott. His history may be only 
the web of a dream as in ^Prince Otto,' the hero of 
which, a descendant of Shakespeare's Prince Florizel, 
plays at being ruler over a petty German princi- 
pality somewhere on the confines of Bohemia, and 
through incapacity for rule loses his crown, and the 
princess is Cinderella. ' St. Ives ' is an account of 
the adventures of a French prisoner in Scotland and 
England during the later years of the Napoleonic wars. 
The historic period which most occupied Stevenson's 
imagination was that of the years following the second 
Pretender's struggle for the English throne in 1745. 
Historic battle scenes he did not describe, for that 
would have placed too great restraint upon his fancy ; 
well-known historical characters he rarely more than 
mentioned, and for the same reason. What he depicted 
is Scotch social life; the tragedy of a house divided 
against itself in its loyalty both to King George and 
Charles Edward ; and the poverty and desperation of 



THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 289 

the Highlanders after they were stripped of their 
arms and plaids. Escapes, broils, fights, and sword- 
play, there are in abundance. For stirring adventure 
like this, Stevenson maintained that only roughly 
outlined characters are necessary, for the reader 
himself at once becomes the hero. And yet in 
two of his romances, * Kidnapped ' and ' The Master 
of Ballantrae,' there is a more detailed study of char- 
acter than in Scott or Dumas. The two masters 
of Ballantrae and David Balfour are Meredithian, 
closely and surely analytical. They are, of course, 
out of the pale of realistic creation, for they are ex- 
traordinary and exceptional. Instead of taking the 
common run of men and telling us why they behave 
as they do, Stevenson began with a dream or with the 
Society for Psychical Eesearch, showing whimsical 
ways in which heredity is imagined to manifest itself, 
or what mad things a man may do who has a clot of 
blood, though only a speck, on the brain. Alan 
Breck, the agent of Prince Charles in the Highlands, 
is Stevenson's master character stroke. After killing 
his enemies,- as they rush upon hinTin the round- 
house of the Covenant, and passing his sword through 
their dead bodies, Alan sits down to a table, sword in 
hand, and breaks forth into a victorious Gaelic song 
composed on the moment. Then he takes off his coat, 
brushes it, and cuts off a silver button as a reward to 
David for services rendered. That insight into the 
make-up of the cavalier, Scott never surpassed. 

Just as in the case of Scott, Stevenson has been 
accompanied and followed by several historical 
romancers, among whom are Conan Doyle, S. R. 
Crockett, Stanley Weyman, Anthony Hope Hawkins, 



290 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

and S. Weir Mitchell ; and by a group of Scotch emo- 
tionalists and humorists, among whom are J. M. Barrie 
and John Watson, who have spread the fame of Thrums 
and Drumtochty. Literary history is thus repeating 
itself. 

4. Rudyard Kipling 

Since the death of Stevenson, the most striking 
figure in our fiction has been Kudyard Kipling. 
When his Anglo-Indian tales first found their way to 
the western world, the critics associated them with 
the empty adventures of E-ider Haggard ; but his suc- 
ceeding publications have forced a readjustment of 
opinion. Kipling has seen atr- opportunity, and he 
has seized it. He is to India somewhat more than 
Maria Edgeworth was to Ireland, and somewhat less 
than Scott was to Scotland. From Burke and Macau- 
lay the public had derived a knowledge of the India 
of Clive and Hastings, sufficient for argument and for 
rhetoric. An imaginative sense of India of the same 
and a little later period appeared now and then in 
Thackeray : in India Colonel Newcome won his lau- 
rels; and Jos Sedley is a type of the old civilian. 
Of the new India of the Queen-Empress and Lord 
Eoberts of Kandahar, Kipling is the first worthy 
interpreter. Of this India he has confined himself 
mostly to Funjaub, which he best knows ; to its 
sweltering heat, and the madness induced thereby, 
its drenching rains and fever and cholera, its blinding 
sand-storms and the picnics they spoil ; the immense 
perspective of a star-lit heaven, the filth and supersti- 
tion of the natives, the love intrigues of civilians, 
the haphazard process of law-making ; a village in- 



THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 291 

vaded and blotted out by the beasts of the jungle ; 
the magnificent ruins of a city, where monkeys ' sit in 
circles on the halls of the king's council-chamber ' ; and 
barrack-room stories, in which the private tells of his 
experiences, his practical jokes, and death grapples on 
the battle-field with giant Afghans. 

One of the remarkable things about all these tales 
is Kipling's nearness to his subject; he does not write 
from the outside of it ; but as one who is a part of it. 
In this he has perhaps been helped by a little Hindoo 
mysticism. In that beautiful poem, ^To the True 
Komance,' he seems to hold that it is possible to get 
beyond the sensuous appearance of things to their 
heart, to arrive at 

. . . . that utter Truth 
The careless angels know. 

This penetrating insight is most obvious when he 
writes of animals. In the Jungle Books he sustains 
this sympathetic attitude for two volumes ; he inter- 
prets the conduct of wolves, bears, panthers, monkeys, 
serpents, and elephants, and translates their lan- 
guage into English. In these fables he has given 
fresh life and meaning to the mediaeval bestiaries, in- 
cidents from which had lived on in modern literature 
only as allegorical adornments for the poets. It is a 
happy coincidence that the beast fable should have 
received its new dress from the jungles of India, one 
of its earliest homes. The fancy that endowed his 
animals with speech, Kipling has now extended to the 
cargo-boat and the locomotive engine. 

In the selection and recombination of the matter of 
real life for his purposes, Kipling is at will a realist 



292 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

or a romancer. As a realist he is an impressionist, 
suggesting liis characters by a few epithets and leav- 
ing to the reader the completion of the sketch. When 
he has done more than this, as in the case of Mulvaney, 
he has revived the method of Chaucer, letting his char- 
acters reveal themselves by the tales they tell. He is 
not a romancer in the sense in which Stevenson was, 
who reared his fabrics on dreams ; for he always has a 
realistic setting, and says much about real things. He 
is not a romancer in the sense in which Scott was, who 
looked backward. He is the romancer of the present; 
of the modern social order, on which shines from afar 
a light as resplendent as that which shone on mediaeval 
society ; for it is the same divi-Qe light of the imagina- 
tion. Kipling feels the presence of romance in shot 
and shell as well as in bow and arrows, and in red 
coats as well as in buff jerkins ; in existing supersti- 
tions as well as in the old ; in the lightning express 
as in the stage-coach; in a Vermont farmer as in 
Eobin Hood ; in the fishing schooner as in the viking's 
ship ; in the loves of Mulvaney and Dinah as in Ivan- 
hoe and Eowena ; in the huge python as in the fire- 
breathing dragon. This is his great distinction in an 
age that has come to look on its marvels with dull, 
passive eyes. 



CONCLUSION 

A TREATISE on fiction ought to close, like the old 
heart-easing novels, with a look into the future. We 
may be sure that the novel will conform, as it has done 
since Arthurian romance, to the moods of human na- 
ture as they vary from epoch to epoch ; that at one 
time will prevail realism — the stern endeavor to 
keep the imaginative product in harmon}^ with the 
actual ; and at another time, idealism — the height- 
ening of incident and passion for grand effects. What 
is to happen in the first quarter of the twentieth 
century, it would be most hazardous to prophesy. 
Besides tearing down and building anew the internal 
structure of the novel, the contemporary novelists 
would seem also to have modified permanently its 
outer form. Hardy has cut the three volume novel 
down to one volume. The short-story has found 
its own beautiful art ; but it can never hope to 
become a universal type, for it gives scant room. 
Kipling, who has experimented all the way from 
three to three hundred pages, is bringing into 
fashion a novel of from twenty-five to fifty pages. 
The paganism which characterizes the thought of 
the contemporary novel has appeared at intervals in 
our fiction from the time the Anglo-Saxon gleemen 
sang of Beowulf and Grendel; it is in Sterne, in 
the Gothic romancers, and in Scott. Where it is 

293 



294 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

not a morbid sentiment, it is manifest in a love of 
adventure and an exaltation of the strong man. To 
the novel of the future, Kipling, who is gathering 
to himself present-day tendencies, may be pointing 
the way. 



APPENDIX 



^ 



APPENDIX 



A LIST OF TWENTY-FIVE PROSE FICTIONS 

These books, arranged in logical order, show in large out- 
line the development of the English novel. AU of them 
may be found in ordinary public libraries or procured of 
the bookseller. For convenient reference, I have indicated 
good editions. 

1. Morte Darthur, by Sir Thos. Malory. Books I., III., 
VI., XVII., XXI. Globe ed. (The Macmillan Co., London 
and New York.) 

2. Rosalind, by Thos. Lodge. CasseU's National Library. 
(Cassell and Co., London and N. Y.) 

3. Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan. Temple Classics. 
(J. M. Dent and Co., London. Macmillan, N. Y.) 

4. Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe.^ Bohn's Library. 
(Geo. Bell and Sons, London. Macmillan, N. Y.) 

5. Roderick Random, by Tobias Smollett. Bohn's Library. 

6. Clarissa Harlowe, by Samuel Richardson. Abridged 
ed. (Henry Holt and Co., N. Y. Geo. Routledge and Sons, 
London and N. Y.) 

7. Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding. Bohn's Library. 

8. Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne. Abridged ed. 
Morley's Universal Library. (Routledge.) 

9. The Vicar of Wakefield, by Oliver Goldsmith. Temple 
Classics. (Dent. Macmillan.) 

10. Castle Rackrent, by Maria Edge worth, ed. with The 
Absentee by A. Thackeray Ritchie. (Macmillan.) 

297 



298 DEVELOPMENT OE THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

11. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, ed. R. B. John- 
son. (Dent. Macmillan.) 

12. Waverley, by Sir Walter Scott. The Dryburgh ed. 
(A. and C. Black, London. Macmillan, N. Y.) 

13. Kenilworth, by Sir Walter Scott. The Dryburgh ed. 

14. The Pathfinder, by J. F. Cooper. The Mohawk ed. 
(G. P. Putnam's Sons, N. Y. and London.) 

15. The Scarlet Letter, by N". Hawthorne. (Houghton, 
Mifflin and Co., Boston. Cassell and Co., London.) 

16. Pelham, by Bulwer-Lytton, New Library ed. (Rout- 
ledge.) 

17. David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, ed. by Charles 
Dickens the younger. (Macmillan.) 

18. Vanity Fair, by W. M. Thackeray. Biographical ed. 
(Harper and Brothers, N. Y. Smith and Elder, London.) 

19. Barchester Towers, by Antholiy Trollope, in Chroni- 
cles of Barsetshire series. (Dodd, Mead and Co., N. Y. 
Chapman and Hall, London.) 

20. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, illustrated by H. S. 
Greig. (Dent. Macmillan.) 

21. Adam Bede, by George Eliot. (Harper, N. Y. 
Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh.) 

22. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, by Geo. Meredith. 
The Author's ed. (A. Constable and Co., London. Chas. 
Scribner's Sons, N. Y.) 

23. The Return of the Native, by Thos. Hardy. Crown 
8vo ed. (Harper.) 

24. Treasure Island, by R. L. Stevenson. (Scribner. 
Cassell and Co.) 

25. The Brushwood Boy, by Rudyard Kipling, in The 
Day's Work. (Macmillan, London. Doubleday and 
McClure, N. Y.) 

The means of enlarging the list will be obvious to the 
reader of this book. One should read other novels by Jane 
Austen, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Charlotte 
Bronte, George Eliot, and Stevenson. Also the outlines 



TWENTY-FIVE PROSE FICTIONS 299 

may be filled in as thus : Don Quixote after 1 ; Gil Bias 
before 7; Evelina after 9; a Gothic romance before Scott; 
Bulwer's Last of the Barons after 13 ; Kingsley's Westward 
Ho ! and Foe's tales after 14 ; one of Mrs. Gaskell's novels 
after 19 ; a novel by Howells or James after 23. See the 
indications for the student which immediately follow. 



n 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL AND OTHER NOTES 

The aim of the following notes is to furnish means for a 
still further study of English fiction. The arrangement 
follows the main text, the numerals denoting page. For 
critical works on fiction, the reader is referred to the list 
prefixed to J. C. Dunlop's History of Prose Fiction, revised 
ed., Lond. and N. Y., 1888 ; and for biography, excepting 
American writers, to the Dictionanyj)/ National Biography, 
Lond. and N. Y., 1885-99. As a foundation for the study 
of the modern novel, the student should become acquainted 
with what was done in fiction by the Greeks ; for among 
them, just as in the Middle Age, the romance detached itself 
from the epic. See for a guide Der griechische Roman, by 
E. Rohde, Leipzig, 1876, and A History of the Novel previous 
to the 17th Century, by F. M. Warren, N. Y, 1895. For 
English translations of the Greek novel, Greek Romances, 
Bohn's Library. For some suggestions concerning the in- 
fluence of Greek romance on mediaeval romance, see A History 
of English Poetry, by W. J. Courthope, vol. i., Lond. and 
N. Y., 1895. 

Introduction 

The early use of the word 'romance' from Fr. roman: 
Romania i., 1-22 ; Chaucer's ' Rime of Sir Thopas,' and 
'Death of Blanche the Duchess,' line 48 et seq. For 'novel' 
of same and later period : the Flamenca (thirteenth century), 
ed. P. Meyer, Paris, 1865; the Decameron of Boccaccio 
(fourteenth century), ed. T. Wright, Lond., 1873; and 
the Palace of Pleasure, Wm. Painter, 1566, ed. J. Jacobs, 

300 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 301 

Lond., 1890. Contemporary use : ' The Art of Fiction,' H. 
James, in Partial Portraits, Lond., 1888 ; ' A Gossip on Ro- 
mance ' and ' A Humble Remonstrance,' R. L. Stevenson, in 
Memories and Portraits, N. Y., 1894. 

1. The Mediaeval Romancers and Story-tellers 

Catalogue of Romances in the Department of MSS. in the 
Brit. Museum, H. L. D. Ward, Lond., vol. i., 1883, vol. ii., 
1893. Historia Regum Britannice, Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. 
San Marte, Halle, 1854 ; Eng. trans. Bohn's Library. Morte 
Darthur, Sir Thos. Malory, ed. H. O. Sommer, Lond., 1889. 

For love-casuistry, see De Amore (about 1200) by Andre le 
Chapelain, ed. E. Trojel, Copenhagen, 1892, and Chaucer's 
Troilus and Cressida. 

For romances of adventure and miscellaneous fictions, see 
Ancient Engleish Metrical Romancees, J. Ritson, 3 vols., 
Lond., 1802; Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances^ 
Geo. Ellis, 3 vols., Lond., 1805, revised by J. O. Halliwell, 
Bohn's Library ; English Metrical Romances, H. Weber, 3 vols., 
Edinburgh, 1810; Fabliaux or Tales, modernized, G. Way, 
Lond., 1815; publications of the Early English Text Society; 
Romances of Chivalry, in facsimile, John Ashton, Lond., 
1887; Gesta Romanorum, ed. S.J. Herrtage, Lond., 1879. 

The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Glohe-jed., Lond. and 
N. Y., 1898. Confessio Amantis, John Gower, ed. R. Pauli, 
Lond., 1857. 

6. The Spanish Influence 

Amadis de Gaula, Ordoiiez de Montalvo, Eng. trans, by 
A. Munday, completed 1620, abridged by R. Southey, 1803, 
latest reprint, Lond., 1872. The Diana of Geo. of Monte- 
mayor, Eng. trans. B. Yong, 1598. For bibliog. of picaresque 
novel, see History of Spanish Fiction, Geo. Ticknor, revised 
ed., Boston, 1866; and Etudes sur UEspagne, A. Morel- 
Fatio, ser. 1, Paris, 1888. English trans, of Lazarillo de 
Tonnes and Guzman de Alfarache, X. Y., 1890. Don Quixote, 
Miguel de Cervantes, Eng. trans. H. E. Watts, Lond., 1888. 



302 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

It is believed that the picaresque novel has behind it lost 
Spanish farces. The picaresque element is certainly very- 
noticeable in Celestina, a tragi-comedy by F. de Rojas, 1492, 
Englished by J. Mabbe, 1631, reprinted with introduction 
by J. F. Kelly, London, 1894. For the picaresque escapade 
even in ancient fiction, see The Golden Ass of Apuleius. 
(Eng. trans. Bohn's Library.) 

10. The Elizabethans 

For general bibliog., 7''he English Novel in the Time of 
Shakespeare, J. J. Jusserand, Lond. and N. Y., 1890. For 
translations from the Italian, see paper by M. A. Scott in 
Publications of the Modern Language Association of Amer- 
ica for 1896. The most influential Greek romance was 
Theagenes and Chariclea, trans, by T. Underdo wn, 1577, 
revised 1587, reprint Lond., 1895. For jests, Shakespeare 
Jest-Books, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, Lond., 1864. For miscellaneous 
fictions, Early English Prose Romances, ed. W. J. Thoms, 
2d ed. Lond., 1858; Romances of Chivalry, ed. J. Ashton, 
Lond., 1887 ; and Early Prose Romances, ed. H. Morley, 
Lond., 1889. For rogue stories. The Fraternitye of Vaca- 
bondes, etc., by John Awdeley, ed. E. Viles, Lond., 1869. 

There is no reprint of H. Chettle's Piers Plain. In fact, the 
only extant copy of it (so far as I know) is in the Bodleian 
Library at Oxford. For comparison with Lazarillo, it may 
be of interest to observe here that the novel is a pastoral 
in its setting, and that Piers the rogue is in turn servant to 
(1) Thrasilio, a court braggadocio and flatterer, (2) Flavins, 
a prodigal, (3) a broker, who ruins young gentlemen, (4) a 
miser, and (5) Petrusio, an embodiment of treachery. Sitting 
between two shepherds in the classic vale of Tempe, Piers 
^relates his experiences with these various masters during an 
apprenticeship of seven years. 

The Arcadia, Sir P. Sidney, ed. H. O. Sommer, Lond., 
1891. Complete Works of Robt. Greene, ed. A. B. Grosart, 
Lond., 1881-86. Complete Works of Thos. Nash, ed. Gro- 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 80S 

sart, Lond., 1883-85. The Euphues, Jno. Lyly, Arber 
reprints, Lond., 1868. Complete Works of Thos. Lodge, 
Hunterian Club, 1883. 

13. The Historical Allegory and the French Influence 

Argenis, Jno. Barclay, Eng. trans. Sir R. LeGrys, 1629; 
More's Utopia, Eng. trans. Ralph Robinson, 2d and rev. ed., 
1556 ; Arber reprints, 1869. For the French romances of the 
seventeenth century, see Dunlop's History of Prose Fiction ; 
Geschickte des franzosischen Romans im xvii Jahrhundert, H. 
Korting, Oppeln and Leipzig, 1885-87; Le Roman au dix- 
septihne siecle, Andre Le Breton, Paris, 1890 ; Manuel de la 
Litterature fran^aise, F. Brunetiere, Paris, 1898. (Eng. trans. 
Boston, 1898.) For English translations of Fr. romances, 
see Jusserand. 

For the passage of mediaeval love-casuistry into the modern 
novel, see the Astree (1610?) by Honore d'Urf^, pt. ii., 
bk. V. Here are formulated twelve laws of love. 

18. The Restoration 

For literary coteries, see Jusserand, ch. vii., and 'The 
Matchless Orinda' in Seventeenth Centura/ Studies, E. Gosse, 
new ed., Lond., 1895. 

Aphra Behn, Works, Lond., 1871. JohirBunyan, Grace 
Abounding, Cassell's Natl Library; Pilgrim's Progress, 
Temple Classics. 

22. Literary Forms that contributed to the Novel 

Biography. — Margaret Duchess of Newcastle : Nature's 
Pictures drawn by Fancy's Pencil, Lond., 1656, containing 
amusing sketches of herself and her father ; and Life of 
Wm. Cavendish, Lond., 1667. 

Letters. — See Le Salut d'amour dans les litteratures pro- 
ven^ale et fran^aise, P. Meyer, Paris, 1867; Amadis ; Euphues; 
Scuderi's Clelie; works of Aphra Behn; CCXI Sociable 
Letters by Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, Lond., 1666; 
Letters written by Mary Manley, 1696, and novels of E. Hay- 



304 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

wood, Lond., 1725. Also the Letters of a Portuguese Nun, 
ed. with a bibliog. E. Prestage, Lond., 1893, and the Letters 
of Eloisa and Abelard, trans, by J. Hughes, 4th ed. Lond., 
1722. 

Character Books. — For bibliog., see appendix to Jno. 
Earle's Microcosmography (1628), ed. by P. Bliss, Lond., 
1811. The Characters of Theophrastus were translated into 
Latin by I. Casaubon, Lond., 1592 ; Eng. trans, by J. Healey 
bears the date of 1616. De Coverley Papers from the Spec- 
tator, Globe ed., Lond. and N. Y. 

27. Daniel Defoe 

The Romances and Narratives of D. Defoe, ed. G. A. 
Aitkin, Lond. and N. Y., 1895, 16 vols. Reprint of 1st ed. of 
Robinson Crusoe, with a bibliog., AsJDobson, Lond. and N. Y., 
1883. For translations and imitations, see Robinson und 
Robinsonaden, H. Ullrich, Weimar, 1898. 

Gulliver's Travels by J. Swift, Temple Classics. For Swift 
on the purpose of the romance, see letter to Pope 29 Sept., 
1725, in Works of Swift, ed. W. Scott, Lond., 1814., vol. xvii., 
p. 39. 

31. Samuel Richardson 

Standard ed. by Leslie Stephen, Lond., 1883, 12 vols. 
Source of facts of life and popularity. The Correspondence 
of Samuel Richardson, A. L. Barbauld, Lond., 1804, 6 vols. 
For additional light on Richardson's aims, postscript to 
Clarissa and preface to Grandison, and the two letters 
appended to 'A Collection of the Moral and Instructive 
Sentiments, etc., contained in the Histories of Pamela, Cla- 
rissa, and Sir Charles Grandison,' Lond., 1755. For genesis 
of Pamela, Correspondence, vol. i., pp. Ixix-lxxvi. See simi- 
lar story, told in three letters, in Spectator, N'o. 375. 

For Richardson's relation to the drama, should be read 
particularly the plays of Thos. Otway, Colley Cibber, Richard 
Steele, and Geo. Lillo. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 305 

For the extensive vogue of Richardson, and the imitations 
of him on the Continent, see Richardson, Rousseau und 
Goethe, Erich Schmidt, Jena, 1875 ; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau 
et les origines du cosmopolitisme litteraire, J. Texte, Paris, 1895. 
(Eng. trans, by J. W. Matthews, N. Y., 1899.) For French 
estimate of him, see Diderot's Eloge de Richardson; and 
Rousseau's Lettre a d'Alembert sur les spectacles. For the 
German view, see Correspondence, vol. iii., 140-158. For the 
Dutch view. Correspondence, vol. v., 241-270. For Goethe 
on morality of, Dichtung und Wahrheit, bk. xiii. For Dr. 
Johnson on morality of. Correspondence, v., 281-285, and 
Boswell's Life of Johnson, ch. iii. 

42. Henry Fielding 

Works, ed. Geo. Saintsbury, Lond. and N. Y., 1893, 12 
vols. For Fielding on his aims, see especially preface to 
Joseph Andrews, and the introductory chapter to book iii. 
For external nature in Fielding, Tom Jones, bk. i., ch. iv., 
and bk. xi., ch. ix. Life of H. Fielding, A. Dobson, Lond. 
and N. Y., 1883. 

57. The Novel vs. the Drama 

For the outer and the fundamental differences between the 
drama and the novel, see Goethe, WilhelnTMeisters Lehrjahre, 
bk. v., ch. vii. ; Brunetiere, Les Epoques du Theatre Fran^ais, 
Paris, 1892, premiere conference ; Brander Matthews, Studies 
of the Stage, N. Y., 1894, ch. i. ; Henry James, The Tragic 
Muse, N. Y., 1890, ch. iv. ; R. L. Stevenson, 'A Humble Re- 
monstrance ' in Memories and Portraits. On revolt of public 
and literature from regular tragedy, David Simple, S. Field- 
ing, bk. ii., ch. ii. ; and Correspondence of Richardson, vol. iv., 
220. 

63. Tobias Smollett 

Works, ed. Geo. Saintsbury, Lond. and Phila., 1895, 12 
vols. Smollett on his sources, preface to Roderick Random. 

X 



306 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

69. Laurence Sterne 

Works, ed. Geo. Saintsbury, Lond. and Phila., 1894, 6 
vols. Standard life, by P. Fitzgerald, new ed., Lond., 1896. 
On Sterne's sources, Illustrations of Sterne, Dr. John Ferriar, 
Manchester and Lond., 1798. For bibliog. and influence, 
the article on Sterne in Diet. NaVl Biog. 

76. The Minor Novelists 

No recent edition of David Simple. Facsimile reprint of 
Rasselas, ed. J. Macaulay, Lond., 1884. Facsimile reprint of 
the Vicar of Wakefield, ed. A. Dobson, Lond., 1885. Both 
contain bibliographies. For Goldsmith on the humor of 
Sterne, the Citizen of the World, Letter liii. 

84. Novel of Fikrpose 

Pedagogic. — J. J. Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise and Smiley 
(Euvres, Paris, 1823-26. The Fool of Quality, by H. Brooke, 
Lond., 1859. Sandford and Merton, Thos. Day, St. Nicholas 
series, N. Y. 

Revolutionary. — Of most of these fictions, there are no 
reprints. Novels of R. Bage, Ballantyne's Novelist's Library, 
Lond., 1824. Works of Amelia Opie, Boston, 1827, 10 vols. 
Caleb Williams, W. Godwin, Boston, 1876 ; Nature and Art, 
E. Inchbald, Cassell's Nat'l Library. On Godwin, see The 
Spirit of the Age, by W. Hazlitt, 1825. For current specula- 
tions popularized in these novels. Vindication of the Rights 
of Woman, Mary W. Godwin, 1792, reprint, Lond. and N. Y., 
1891 ; and Political Justice, Wm. Godwin, 1793. 

93. The Light Transcript of Contemporary Manners 

Evelina and Cecilia, Frances Burney, ed. R. B. Johnson, 
Lond. and N. Y., 1893 ; works of Maria Edgeworth (New 
Longford ed.), 10 vols., Lond., 1893. For the change in 
manners in the half-century following Richardson, see Char- 
lotte Smith's Desmond (1792), vol. ii., letter xii., pp. 172-173, 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 307 

where the immorality of Richardson is attacked. See also 
R. Cumberland's Henry (1795), bk. v., ch. i. Illustrative of 
the manners depicted by Frances Burney, see ' Diary and 
Letters of Madame d'Arblay, as edited [1842-46] by her 
niece Charlotte Barrett,' new ed., Lond., 1893. 

98. The Gothic Romance 

For the romantic revival, of which the Gothic and his- 
torical romances are a part, see English Romanticism, 
Eighteenth Century, H. A. Beers, N. Y., 1898 ; and the Be- 
ginnings of the English Romantic Movement, W. L. Phelps, 
Boston, 1893. Longsword, attributed to Rev. Thos. Leland in 
European Magazine for Aug., 1799, vol. xxxvi., p. 75 ; no recent 
ed. The Old English Baron, Clara Reeve, Cassell's Nat'l 
Lib. The Castle of Otranto, Cassell's Nat'l Lib. Vathek, 
Wm. Beckford, ed. R. Garnett, Lond., 1893. Reprint of 
Radcliffe's Italian, Romance of The Forest, and Mysteries of 
Udolpho, Lond., 1877. The Monk, M. G. Lewis, Phila., 1884. 
Latest ed. of C. B. Brown, Phila., 1877. Shelley's romances, 
in Works, Lond., 1875. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, Rout- 
ledge's Pocket Library, 1888. 

110. The Historical Romance 

On the survival of the seventeenth-century romance, see 
The Female Quixote, Charlotte Lennox, Lond., 1752 ; The 
Phoenix (a trans, of Argenis), by Clara Reeve, Lond., 1772; 
and Scott's general preface (1829) to Waverley. None of 
the historical romances of the period have been recently 
republished, except Jane Porter's, which may be found in 
the Oxford series, N. Y. 

Some notion of the extensive vogue of the historical 
romance during the thirty years immediately preceding 
Waverley is afforded by the following incomplete list of 
tales more or less historical : — 

The Recess, Miss Sophia Lee, 1783-86; Warbeck, 1786; 
Alan Fitzoshorne, Miss Anne Fuller, 1787; William of Nor- 



308 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

mandy, 1787; The Son of Ethehvulf, Anne Fuller, 1789-, 
Earl Strongbow, James White, 1789; John of Gaunty 
J. White, 1790; Historic Tales, 1790; Adventures of King 
Richard, Cceur de Lion, J. White, 1791 ; The Duchess 
of York, 1791 ; The Foresters, Jeremy Belknap, 1792 ; 
The Minstrel, 1793 ; Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon, 
Clara Reeve, i793; The Haunted Priory, Stephen Cullen, 
1794; An Antiquarian Romance, Thos. Pownall, 1795; 
The Duke of Clarence, 1795; Montford Castle, 1796; The 
Canterbury Tales, Harriet and Sophia Lee, 1797-1805 
The Knights, 1798; The Abbess, S. W. H. Ireland, 1799 
St. Leon, Wm. Godwin, 1799 ; A Northumbrian Tale, 1799 
Midsummer Eve, 1801; Thaddeus of Warsaw, Miss Jane 
Porter, 1803; Astonishment!^! Francis Lathom, 1804; The 
Forester, Sir S. E. Brydges, 1804^ The Siviss Emigrants, 
Hugh Murray, 1804 ; St. Clair of the Isles, Elizabeth Helme, 
1804; Sherwood Forest, Mrs. V. R. Good, 1804; Gondez the 
Monk, S. W. H. Ireland, 1805; The Mysterious Freebooter^ 
F. Lathom, 1806; A Peep at Our Ancestors, Mrs. Henrietta 
Mosse, 1807; The Fatal Vow, F. Lathom, 1807; Queenhoo- 
Hall, Joseph Strutt, 1808 ; The Husband and the Lover, Miss 
A. T. Palmer, 1809; Don Sebastian, A. M. Porter, 1809; 
Anne of Brittany, 1810 ; Scenes in Feudal Times, R. H. 
Wilmot, 1809; Ferdinand and Ordella, Mrs. M. A. C. 
Bradshaw, 1810; Edgar, Mrs. Elizabeth Appleton, 1810; 
The Scottish Chiefs, Jane Porter, 1810; Edwy and Elgiva, 
John Agg, 1811 ; The Lady of the Lake (founded on Scott's 
poem), 1810 ; Despotism or the Fall of the Jesuits, Isaac 
D'Israeli, 1811 ; Alonzo and Melissa, Isaac Mitchell, 1811 ; 
The Loyalists, Mrs. Jane West, 1812 ; The Scottish Adventurers, 
Hector MacNeil, 1812; The Border Chieftains, Miss Mary 
Houghton, 1813; Alicia de Lacy, Jane West, 1814. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 309 

114. Jane Austen 

Novels, Lond. and X. Y., 1895, 10 vols. A Memoir of Jane 
Austen, by her nephew, J. E. Austen-Leigh, 2d ed., Lond., 
1871. For early appreciation of, R. Whately, Quarterly 
Review, Jan. 1821 (article entitled Modern Novels) ; Scott's 
Journal, 14 Mar. 1826, and 18 April, 1827; Macaulay's 
' Essay on Mme. d'Arblay,' Ed. Rev., Jan. 1843. For recent 
estimate and full bibliography. Life of Jane Austen, by G. 
Smith, Lond., 1890. 

125. Sir 'Walter Scott 

Convenient recent edition, with introduction by F. W. 
Farrar, Lond. and N. Y., 1898, 25 vols. Standard life of 
Scott, by J. G. Lockhart, 1837, often reprinted. For Scott 
on himself, see Lockhart, the Journal of Sir Walter Scott 
(1890), and the prefaces, especially to Waverley. For lively 
contemporary criticism of, see 'Novels by the Author of 
Waverley,' Quarterly Rev., Oct. 1821, vol. xxvi., 109-148. On 
Scott's style, see T. Carlyle, in West. Rev., Jan. 1838, vol. 
xxviii., 293-345 (article reprinted in Critical and Miscella- 
neous Essays) ; W. Bagehot's essay on the Waverley Novels, 
Literary Studies, vol. ii., Lond., 1879 ; and R. L. Stevenson's 
' A Gossip on Romance,' in Memories and Bortraits. For the 
literary and romantic treatment of history, see Coleridge on 
Shakespeare's historical plays, in the Complete Works of 
Coleridge, Lond., 1871, vol. iv., 116 seq. 

For Scott in Germany, see Gottschall, cited under Cooper; 
for Scott in France, Le Roman Historique, Louis Maigron, 
Paris, 1898. 

136. Scott's Legacy 

Novels of A. E. Bray, Lond., 1884, 12 vols. Works of H. 
Smith, Lond., 1826-44, 26 vols. Novels of G. P. R. James, 
republished in part by Routledge. Novels of W. H. Ains- 
worth. Library ed., Lond. and N. Y., 16 vols. Works of Bul- 
wer-Lytton, New Library ed., Boston, 1892-93, 40 vols. 



310 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Novels of Chas. Kingsley, Pocket ed., Lond. and N. Y., 1895, 
11 vols. 

For Bulwer on his art, see preface to his historical novels. 
For Kingsley on his purpose in Hypatia, see letter to Rev. 
F. D. Maurice, 16 Jan. 1851, in ' Charles Kingsley, His Let- 
ters, and Memories of his Life,' ed. by his wife, Lond., 1892, 



149. The Romance of "War 

Stories of Waterloo, and The Bivouac, by W. H. Maxwell, 
Notable Novels ser., Lond. and N. Y. The Military Novels 
of Charles Lever, Lond. and Boston, 1891-92, 9 vols. Novels 
of James Grant, Lond. and N. Y., 1882, 34 vols. 

150. James Fenimore Coopex^and the Romance of 
the Forest and the Sea 

Works (Mohawk ed.), N. Y., 1896, 32 vols. For life, see 
James Fenimore Cooper, T. R. Lounsbury, N. Y., 1883. 
Novels of Captain Frederick Marryat, ed. R. B. Johnson, 
Lond. and Boston, 1896, 22 vols. 

Cooper's influence. Novels of W. G. Simms ; novels of Cap- 
tain Mayne Reid, and of W. Clark Russell, and sketches of 
Western life by Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, and Owen 
Wister. See also Michael Scott's Tom Cringle's Log, ed. M. 
Morris, Lond. and N. Y., 1895. Cooper was at once imitated 
in French and German, and the imitations, translated into 
English, were popular both in Eng. and in the U. S. Karl 
Postl (pseudonym, Charles Sealsfield), a German refugee, 
travelled in the Southwest, and wrote several Cooper tales, 
among which are Das Kajiitenhuch (1840) and Siiden und 
Norden (1842-43), well known in their Eng. translations. 
For him and the influence of Cooper in Germany, see Die 
deutsche Nationallitteratur des 19 Jahrhunderts by R. von 
Gottschall, vol. iv. Gustave Aimard, when a boy, came to 
the U. S., and lived for ten years in Arkansas and the neigh- 
boring territories. He wrote, in French, tales of the South- 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 311 

west, the Rocky Mts., and California. Among them in 
Eng. trans, are : The Prairie Flower, 1861 ; The Last of the 
Incas, 1862 ; The Indian Scout, 1862 ; The Buccaneer Chief, 
1864, — all published in London. 

158. The Renovation of Gothic Romance 

Melmoth the Wanderer, C. R. Maturin, with memoir and 
bibliog., Lond., 1892, 3 vols. Tales of a Traveller, W. Irv- 
ing, Knickerbocker ed., N. Y., 1897. For Bulwer see p. 
309. The Works of E. A. Poe, ed. E. C. Stedman and G. 
E. Woodberry, Chicago, 1894-95, 10 vols. A Tale for a 
Chimney Corner in Tales of Leigh Hunt, ed. AV. Knight, 
Lond. and Phila., 1891. The complete Works of N. 
Hawthorne, Boston, 1895, 13 vols. 

168. The Minor Humorists and the Author of ' Pick- 
wick' 

Novels of Susan Ferrier, ed. R. B. Johnson, Lond. and 
N. Y., 1893. Novels of J. Gait, ed. D. S. Meldrum, Edin. 
and Boston, 1895-96, 8 vols., Mansie Wauch, D. M. Moir, 
new ed., Edin., 1895. 

Our Village, M. R. Mitford, ed. A. T. Ritchie, Lond. and 
N. Y., 1893. 

The Novels of T. L. Peacock, ed. Geo. Saintsbury, Lond. 
and N. Y., 1895-97, 5 vols. The Adventures of Hajji Baha 
of Ispahan, J. Morier, ed. G. N. Curzon, Lond. and N. Y., 
1895. 

Works of J. and M. Banim, Dublin and N. Y., 1865, 10 
vols. Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, W. Carleton, 
ed. D. J. O'Donoghue, Lond. and N. Y., 1896, 4 vols. Handy 
Andy, Samuel Lover, ed. C. Whibley, Lond. and N. Y., 1896. 

Novels of B. Disraeli, Lond. and N. Y., 1878, 10 vols. For 
works of Bulwer-Lytton, see page 309. For specimens of 
Mrs. Gore's fashionable tales. The Dean's Daughter, Lo veil's 
Lib., and Self, Harper's Lib. Select Novels. Novels of Theo. 
Hook, Lond. and N. Y., 1872-73, 15 vols. Reprint of Pierce 



312 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

Egaii's Tom and Jerry, Pt. I., Lond., 1869 ; Pt. II., 1889. On 
the numerous imitations, see The Finish, etc. ch. i., where 
Egan discusses them ; and Diet. Nafl Biog. For Thackeray 
on, see essay on George Cruikshank, West. Rev., June, 1840, 
and Tunhridge Toys and De Juventute in Roundabout Papers. 
For word Pickwick, see the Finish, ch. ii. 

180. Charles Dickens and the Humanitarian Novel 

On state of English society in first half of nineteenth cen- 
tury, see John Howard's State of the Prisons in Eng. and 
Wales, 4th ed., Lond., 1792 ; Sir James Mackintosh, ' On State 
of Criminal Law,' Miscellaneous Works, Lond., 1846, vol. iii. ; 
Social England, ed. by H. D. Traill, Lond., and N. Y., vol. v., 
1896, vol. vi., 1897 ; Popular History of England, by Charles 
Knight, Lond., 1856-62, vol. viii.'S-.and Thos. Carlyle on 
'Model Prisons' in Latter Day Pamphlets. Carlyle is cor- 
roborated by Thackeray in Pendennis, vol. i., ch. xxix. 

On the historical connection between the humanitarian 
novel and the revolutionary school of Godwin, see preface 
to first ed. of Paul Clifford and The Life, etc. of Edward 
Bulwer, Lord Lytton, by his son, the Earl of Lytton, Lond., 
1883, bk. vii., ch. xiii. The theme of Paid Clifford was 
suggested by Godwin. 

The Novels of Charles Dickens, with introduction by 
Charles Dickens the younger, Lond. and N. Y., 1892-96 ; or 
the Gadshill edition, ed. A. Lang, Lond. and N. Y., 1896-99. 
Standard Life of Dickens by John Forster, Lond., 1872-74. 
The literature on Dickens is immense. See particularly 
Charles Dickens, by W. Bagehot, Natl Review, Oct. 1858, 
republished in Literary Studies, vol. ii. ; and Charles Dickens, 
a critical study, by G. Gissing, Lond. and N. Y., 1898. 

For novels of C. Kingsley, see p. 310. Works of E. Gas- 
kell, Lond. and N. Y., 1897, 8 vols. The Writings of H. B. 
Stowe, Boston, 1896, 16 vols. For unprecedented popularity 
of ' Uncle Tom's Cabin,' see Life of U. B. StowCj by C. E. 
Stowe, Boston, 1889. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 313 

197. "William Makepeace Thackeray- 
Works of W. M. Thackeray, Avith biographical introduc- 
tions, A. T. Ritchie, Lond. and N. Y., 1898-99. Thackeray, 
by Anthony TroUope, in Eng. Men of Letters series, 1879. 

211. George Borrow 

Works, new ed., Lond. and N. Y., 1888. 

212. Charles Reade 
The Library ed., Lond. and N. Y., 1896. 

215. Anthony Trollope 

The Chronicles of Barsetshire, Lond. and N. Y., 1892, 13 
vols. An Autobiography, by Anthony TroUope, Lond. and 
N. Y., 1883. 

224. Charlotte Bronte 

The Works of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte, illus. 
by H. S. Greig, Lond. and N. Y., 1893, 12 vols. Contempo- 
rary criticism: 'Recent Novels' (G. H. Lewes), Fraser's 
Mag., Dec. 1847; 'Jane Eyre' (Lady Eastlake), Quarterly 
Rev., Dec. 1848; and 'Novels of the Season' (E. P. Whipple), 
North Amer. Rev., Oct. 1848. The Life of Charlotte Bronte, 
by Elizabeth Gaskell, Lond., 1857, often reprinted ; Charlotte 
Bronte and her Circle, C. K. Shorter, Lond. and N. Y., 1896. 

234. Elizabeth Gaskell 

For Works of E. Gaskell, see p. 312. 

237. George Eliot (Marian Evans) 

Cabinet ed. of Works, Edin., Lond., and N. Y., 1896. Life 
of George Eliot, by J. W. Cross, Lond. and N. Y., 1885. 
' George Eliot as Author,' and ' George Eliot's Life and Let- 
ters,' by R. H. Hutton, in Essays on Some of the Modern 
Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith, Lond. and 
N. Y., 1887. Studies in Literature, by E. Dowden, Lond., 



314 DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

1883. Le Naturalisme Anglais (1881), by Ferdinand Brune- 
tiere, in Le Roman Naturaliste, revised ed., Paris, 1892. 

252. George Meredith 

Novels, revised by the author, Lond. and N. Y., 1898. 
'On the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic 
Spirit' (New Quarterly Magazine, April, 1877), republished, 
Lond. and N. Y., 1897. 



^ 



INDEX 



Abbess, The, 308 

Abbot, The, 134 

Abduction, The, 137 

Absentee, The, 96-97, 169, 172, 297 

Adam Bede, 238, 240, 241, 244, 

246, 249, 252, 274, 298 
Addison, Joseph, 24-25, 31, 49, 50, 

52, 54, 58, 100, 147, 166, 179, 203, 

205, 206 
Adeline Mowbray, 90 
Adventurers, The, 137 
iEschylus, 143, 251 
-^sopian fables, 5 
Agg, John, 308 
Ahne7i, Die, 138 
Aimard, Gustave, 155, 310 
Ainsworth, W. H., 141-143, 147, 

190, 198, 280, 309 
Akenside, Mark, 65 
Alan Fitzosborne , 307 
Aleman, Mateo, 63 
Alembert, Jean d', 41 
Alexander : romances of, 1 
Alicia de Lacy, 308 
Almeria, 96 
Alton Locke, 194, 219 
Amadis de Gaula, 7, 11, 16, 57, 

301, 303 
Amazing Marriage, The, 252, 

253 
Amelia, 54-57, 63, 72, 77, 272 
Amos Barton, 237, 238, 244 
Anatomy of Melancholy , 69, 70 
Ancestors, The, 138 
Ancient Mariner, The, 163 



Anna St. Ives, 88-89 

Annals of the Parish, The, 169- 
170 

Anne of Brittany, 308 

Anselmo, 136 

Antiquarian Romance, An, 308 

Antiquary, The, 127, 131 

Antony and Cleopatra, 133 

Appleton, Elizabeth, 308 

Apuleius, Lucius, 302 

Aquinas, St. Thomas, 251 

Arabian Nights, 103, 185 

Arblay, Mme. d', 121. See Bar- 
ney, Frances 

Arblay, Mme. d\ Diary and Let- 
ters of, 307 

Arblay, Mme. d', Macaulay's es- 
say, 309 

Arbuthnot, John, 70 

Arcadia (Sannazaro's), 8 

Arcadia (Sidney's), 11, 13, 14, 19, 
25, 113, 302 

Aretina, 19 

Argenis, 14-15, 303, 307 

Ariosto, 10 

Aristophanes, 10, 43 

Aristotle, 31, 44 and n., 45, 273, 286 

Arnold, Matthew, 269 

Art of Fiction, The, 265 n., 267 n., 
301 

Art of Love^ 3 

Arthur Arundel, 140 

Arthur Mervyn, 107 

Arthurian romances, 1-3, 10, 57, 
293 

Ashton, John, 301, 302 



315 



316 



INDEX 



Assommoir, L\ 272 

Astonishment ! 308 

Astree, L', 303 

Asylum, The ; or Alonzo and Me- 
lissa, 151, 308 

Atom, The History and Adven- 
tures of an, 66 

Aucassin et Nicolette, 4 

Auerbach, Berthold, 80 

Austen, Jane, 82, 114-124, 125, 
126, 155, 162, 171, 215, 224, 225, 
231, 232, 255, 298, 309 

Austen, Jane, Life of, 309 

Austen, Jane, Memoir of, 309 

Autobiography, An (Trollope), 
313 

Awdeley, John, 63, 302 

Ayrshire Legatees, The, 169 

B 

Bacon, Francis, 61, 119, 165 

Bage, Robert, 88, 90, 91, 92, 306 
Bagehot, Walter, 52, 184, 309, 312 
Ballad of Dead Ladies, A, 287 
Banim, John, 172, 311 
Banim, Michael, 172, 311 
Barbauld, Mrs. A. L., 304 
Barbour, John, 113 
Barchester Toioers, 218, 221, 298 
Barclay, John, 14-15, 19, 21, 110, 

135, 303 
Barham Downs, 90 
Barrett, E. S., 171 
Barrie, J. M., 171, 290 
Barry Lyndon, 198 
Beauchamp's Career, 252 
Beckford, Wm., 103, 161, 172, 

307 
Beers, H. A., 307 
Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 20, 46, 92, 

303 
Belinda, 96, 172 
Belknap, Jeremy, 151, 308 
Bellamy, Edward, 281 
Bentivolio and Urania, 19 
Berger extravagant, Le, 17 
Betrothed, The, 138 



Bivouac, The, 150, 310 
Bjornson, B., 80 
Black, Wm., 282 
Blackmore, R. D., 282 
Blanche the Duchess, 129, 300 
Boccaccio, 300 
Boileau-Despreaux, N., 17 
Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 

Viscount, 147 
Book of Snobs, The, 198-199, 205 
Border Chieftains, The, 308 
Borrow, Geo., 174 n., 211-212, 

215, 283, 313 
Boswell, James, 73, 305 
Boyle, Roger, 19 
Bradshaw, Mrs. M. A. C, 308 
Brambletye House, 140 
Bray, Anna E., 139-140, 309 
Bride of Lammermoor, The, 126, 

129 
Bronte; Anne, 228, 313 
Bronte, Charlotte, 205, 224-233, 

234, 237, 255, 298, 313 
Bronte, Charlotte, and her 

Circle, 313 
Bronte, Charlotte, Life of, 313 
Bronte, Emily, 166-167, 228, 232, 

313 
Brooke, Henry, 85, 306 
Brown, C. B., 107, 109, 152, 159, 

161, 307 
Brown, Thomas, 18, 23, 65 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 286 
Browning, Robert, 253 
Bruce, The, 113 
Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 61, 235 

n., 303, 305, 314 
Brushwood Boy, The, 298 
Brydges, Sir S. E., 308 
Buccaneer Chief, The, 311 
Bulwer, Edward, Lord Lytton, 

10, 109, 143-145, 160-161, 172- 

174, 182, 186, 198, 200, 208, 209- 

210, 213, 215, 239, 281, 298, 299, 

309, 310, 311 
Bulwer, Edward, Lord Lytton, 

LiJ'e of, 312 



INDEX 



317 



Bunyan, John, 21, 22, 30, 297, 

303 
Burke, Edmund, 290 
Burlesques (Thackeray), 205 
Burney, Frances, 86, 94-95, 172, 

306, 307. See also Arblay, 

Mme. d' 
Burton, Robert, 69-70 
Byron, Lord, 109, 158 



Caleb Williams, 91, 92, 107, 306 
Calprenede. See La Calprenede 
Candide, 189 
Canons of Criticism, 40 
Canterbury Tales, The (Chau- 
cer's), 6, 25 
Canterbury Tales, The (Harriet 

and Sophia Lee's) , 308 
Carleton, Wm., 172, 311 
Carlyle, Thomas, 61 n., 174, 194, 

197, 213, 219, 235. 253, 309, 312 
Casaubon, Isaac, 304 
Cassandre, 110 
Castle of Otranto, TJie, 101-103, 

307 
Castle Rackrent, 97-98, 297 
Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, 

The, 104 
Cathedral Stories, The, 218-223 
Cavendish, William, Life of, 303 
Caxton, .Wm., 6 
Caxtons, The, 209-210 
Cecilia, 94-95, 172, 306 
Celestina, La, 302 
Cervantes, 9, 10, 43, 44, 52, 53, 

63, 70, 258, 259, 301 
Champion of Virtue, The, 102- 

103 
Chapelain, Andre le, 301 
Chapter on Dreams, A, 286-287 
Charlemagne : romances of, 1, 4 
Charles O'Malley, 150 
Charles Vernon, 195 
Chateaubriand, F. A. de, 106 
Chaucer, 4, 6, 10, 25, 43, 112, 222, 

292, 300, 301 



Cherubina, The Adventures of, 

171 
Chettle, Henry, 12, 28, 302 
Christie Johnstone, 213 
Chronicles of Barsetshire, The, 

218-223, 313 
Chronique du regne de Charles 

IX., La, 138 
Cibber, Colley, 304 
Cinq-Mars, 138 
Citizen of the World, The, 172, 

306 
Clarissa Harlowe, 31-32, 33, 57, 

62, 63, 94, 274, 297, 304 
Clelie, 17, 303 
CUopdtre, 110 
Cloister and the Hearth, The, 88, 

213, 214, 280 
Coleridge, S. T., 133, 238, 279, 309 
Collier, Jeremy, 36 
Collins, Wilkie, 223, 281 
Collins, Wm., 100 
Colloquies on Society, 159 n. 
Colonel Jack, 29 
Comedy, an essay by Geo. Mere- 
dith, 254, 314 
Coming Race, The, 6, 281 
Comte, Auguste, 236, 243, 249, 

251, 261 
Condorcet, M. J. A., 84 
Confessio Amantis, 301 
Confessions (Rousseau's) , 257 
Congreve, Wm., 46, 58 
Coningsby, 174-175 
Conscious Lovers, The, 37, 58 
Cooper, J. F., 84, 109, 137, 150- 

156, 280, 298, 309, 310 
Cooper, James Fenimore, 310 
Copland, Wm., 7 
Count Fathom, 45, 63, 65, 69, 100 
Country Jilt, The, 204 w. 
Courtenay of Walreddon, 140 
Courthope, W. J., 300 
Cowper, Wm., 122 
Crabbe, Geo., 122 
Cranford, 234-235, 264 
Crockett, S. R., 289 



318 



INDEX 



Cross, J. W., 313 
Crotchet Castle, 171 
Crowne, John, 19 
Cruikshank, Geo., 141, 176, 312 
Cruise of the Midge, The, 156 
Cullen, Stephen, 308 
Cumberland, Richard, 82-83, 307 
Cyropasdia, 32 



Daniel Deronda, 238, 243, 244, 266 
Dante, 159, 248, 251, 269 
Darwin, Charles, 249, 263 
Daudet, Alphonse, 264 
David Balfour, 282 
David Copperjield, 189, 191, 210, 

286 n., 298 
David Simple, 11, 305, 306 
Day, Thomas, 86, 87, 306 
Day's Work, The, 298 
De Amove, 301 
Dean's Daughter, The, 311 
Decameron, The, 300 
De Coverley Papers, The, 304 
Deerslayer, The, 152, 154 
Defoe, Daniel, 20, 27-30, 63, 66, 

100, 101, 135, 147, 151, 161, 166, 

182, 204, 211, 283, 285, 297, 304 
Deloney, Thomas, 12 
De Quincey, Thomas, 166 
Deserted Village, The, 80 
Desmond, 90, 306 
Despotism, 308 
Destiny, 168-169 
Deutsche Nationallitteratur des 

19 Jahrhunderts, Die, 310 
Devereux, 143 
Diana, 8, 11, 301 
Diana of the Crossways, 252, 

254, 255 
Dichtung und Wahrheit, 80, 305 
Dickens, Charles, 10, 40, 67, 109, 

168, 175, 176, 177-193, 196, 198, 

200, 209, 210, 215, 216, 217, 219, 

239, 272, 298, 312 
Dickens, Charles (Walter Bage- 

hot), 312 



Dickens, Charles (Geo. Gissing) , 
312 

Dictionary of National Biogra- 
phy, 15 n., 300, 306, 312 

Diderot, Denis, 41, 305 

Disraeli, Benjamin, 172-173, 174- 
175, 193, 198, 218, 311 

D'Israeli, Isaac, 308 

Divine Comedy, The, 269 

Dobson, Austin, 304, 305, 306 

Docteur Pascal, 270 

Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, 164 

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 283, 
285, 287 

Dr. Thome, 218 

Don Quixote, 9, 25, 63, 299, 301 

Don Sebastian, 308 

Donne, John, 55 

Dowden, Edward, 313 

Doyen de Killerine, Le, 110 

Doyle-, A. Conan, 289 

Drayton, Michael, 160 

Dryden, John, 41, 61 

Duchess of York, The, 308 

Dvke of Clarence, The, 308 

Dumas, the Elder, Alexandre, 
138, 147-148, 283, 288, 289 

Dun, The, 96 

Dunlop, J. C, 300, 303 

D'Urfey, Thomas, 81 

Dynamiter, The, 288 

E 

Earl Stronghow, 112, 308 

Earle, John, 304 

Early English Text Society: 

publications of, 301 
Eastlake, Lady (Elizabeth 

Rigby), 313 
Ebers, Georg, 138 
Eclogues, Vergil, 8 
Edgar, 308 
Edgar Huntley, 107 
Edgeworth, Maria, 86, 37, 95-98, 

129, 169, 172, 213, 234, 267, 290, 

297,306 
Edwy and Elgiva, 308 



INDEX 



319 



Egan, Pierce, 176-177, 178, 179, 

207, 209, 312 
Egoist, The, 252, 254, 256, 258 
Eliot, George, 42, 62, 196, 233, 234, 
235 and n., 237-252, 253, 255, 
257, 258, 263, 266, 268, 269, 272, 
274, 279, 280, 287, 298, 313-314 
Eliot, George, as Author, 313 
Eliot, George, Life and Letters 

of, 313 
Eliot, George, Life of, 313 
Ellis, Geo., 301 
JEloge de Richardson, 305 
Eloisa and Abelard, Letters of, 

304 
Elsie Venner, 281 
JEmile, 85, 86 
Emilia in England, 252 
Emilie de Coulanges, 96 
Emma, 115, 120, 123, 224 
Endicott and the Red Cross, 152 
English Novel in the Time of 

Shakespeare, The, 302 
English Poetry, A History of, 300 
English Rogue, The, 19-20, 24 
Englishman, The, 28 n. 
Ennui, 96-97, 213 
Entail, The, 170 
Epic and Romance, 2 n. 
^poques du Thddtre frangais, 
^Les, 305 

Etudes sur VEspagne, 301 
Eugene Aram, 186, 213 
Evphues, 12-13, 14, 84, 303 
Euripides, 41 

Eustace Fitz-Richard, 137 
Evan Harrington, 252 
Evans, Marian. See Eliot, George 
Evelina, 94, 299, 306 
Evelyn, John, 22 



Fabliau, The mediaeval, 5 ; the 
line of descent from, 27 ; Field- 
ing's relation to, 57 

Fabliaux or Tales, 301 

Faery Queen, 14, 113 



Fall of the House of Usher, The, 

162-163 
Fashionable Tales, 96 
Fatal Voio, The, 308 
Felix Holt, 238, 243, 249 
Female Quixote, The, 307 
Ferdinand and Ordella, 308 
Ferriar, John, 69, 306 
Ferrier, Susan, 168-169, 311 
Fielding, Henry, 9, 10, 25, 42-57, 
58, 60, 63, 64, 65, 67, 72, 73, 76, 
77, 78, 80, 82, 92, 93, 99, 108, 
119, 122, 130, 136, 182, 188, 197, 
198, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 
226, 241, 258, 259, 271, 272, 279. 
285, 297, 305 
Fielding, Henry, Life of, 305 
Fielding, Miss Sarah, 61, 76, 77. 

305 
Fitz of Fitzford, 140 
Fitzgerald, Percy, 306 
Five Years of Youth, 171 
Flamenca, Le roman de, 300 
Fleetwood, 90, 182 
Florice and Blancheflour, 4 
Fool of Quality, The, 85-8fl 

306 
Fordyce, James, 86 
Forester, The, 308 
Foresters, The^jm, 308 
Forster, John, 312 
Fortune des Rougon, La, 270 
Fortunes of Nigel, The, 132, 134, 

136 n., 243 
Framley Parsonage, 218 
Francion, 18 
Frank, 87 

Frankenstein, 108, 142, 307 
Franzdsischen Romans im xvii. 
Jahrhundert, Geschichte des, 
303 
Fraternity of Vagabonds, The, 

63, 302 
Freytag, Gustav, 138 
Froissart, Jean, 112, 146 
Fuller, Anne, 307, 308 
Furetiere, Antoine, 18 



320 



INDEX 



Galland, Antoine, 103 

Gait, John, 137, 155, 168, 169-170, 

171, 311 
Garland, Hamlin, 310 
Garrick, David, 65 
Gaskell, Mrs. Elizabeth, 194-195, 

234-237, 238, 244, 299, 312, 313 
Gates, L. E., 211n. 
Gawain and the Green Knight, 4 
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 2 
George a Green, 227 
Gervase Skinner, 175 
Gesta Romanorum, 301 
Gil Bias, 44, 299 
Gilbert Gurney, 176 
Gissing, Geo., 312 
Gleig, G. R., 149 
Godwin, Mary W. See WoU- 

stonecraft 
Godwin, Wm., 84, 88, 89, 90, 91, 

92-93, 107, 109, 161, 163, 182, 

306, 308, 312 
Goethe, 40, 61, 76 n., 80, 81, 159 

305 
Gotter Griechenlands, Die, 145 
Golden Ass, The, 302 
Goldoni, Carlo, 42 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 10, 78-81, 172, 

182, 297, 306 
Gomberville, Marin le Roy de, 

15, 16 
Gondez the Monk, 308 
Good, Mrs. V. R., 308 
Gore, Mrs. Catherine, 174, 311 
Gosse, Edmund, 303 
Gossip on Romance, A, 301, 309 
Gottschall, R. von, 309, 310 
Gower, John, 5-6, 10, 301 
Grace Abounding, 22, 303 
Grand Gyrus, Le, 15-16 
Grant, James, 149, 150, 280, 310 
Gray, Thomas, 100 
Gray Champion, The, 152 
Greek Romances, 300 
Green, Robert, 12, 13, 18, 302 



Griechische Roman, Der, 300 

Griffith, Richard, 83 

Griffith Gaunt, 213 

Groat's Worth of Wit, 12, 14 

Grosart, A. B., 302 

Guinea, The Adventures of a, 66 

Gulliver's Travels, 30, 304 

Guy of Warwick, 4 

Guzman de Alfarache, 301 

H 
Haring, Wm., 137 
Haggard, H. Rider, 282, 290 
Hajji Baba, 172, 311 
Hall, Joseph, 69 
Hamilton, Anthony, 103 
Hamlet, 37, 62, 108, 123 
Handy Andy, 172, 311 
ihtrd Cash, 213 
Hard Times, 191, 272 
Hardy, Thomas, 272-280, 283, 293, 

298 
Harold, 143 
Harry Lorrequer, 150 
Harry Richmond, 252 
Harte, F. Bret, 1.55, 186, 310 
Hartland Forest, 140 
Haunted and the Haunters, The, 

281 
Haunted Priory, The, 308 
Hawkins, Anthony Hope, 289 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 27, 60, 

109, 152, 162, 163-166, 268, 298, 
311 

Haywood, Mrs, Eliza, 20-21, 65, 

110, 303-304 
Hazlitt, Wm., 92, 306 
Head, Richard, 19-20, 28 
Hedge School, The, 172 
Helbeck of Bannisdale, 269 
Helme, Elizabeth, 308 
Henly, Samuel, 103 
Henry, 82, 307 

Henry de Pomeroy, 140 

Henry Esmond, 146-148, 157, 199, 

205, 206, 224 
Hermsprong, 91, 92 



INDEX 



321 



Hlros de roman, Les, 17 
Hlstoire de M. Cleveland, L\ 110 
Historic Tales, 308 
History of the British Kings 

{Historia Regum Britanniae), 

2,301 
Hobbes, Thomas, Gl, 84 
Hoffmanu, Ernst, 160, 161, 162 
Holbach, P. H., Baron d', 84, 88 
Holcroft, Thomas, 88-89, 90 
Holinshed, Raphael, 112, 132 
Hollow of Three Hills, The, 164 
Holmes, O. W., 281 
Homer, 2G, 41, 44 
Hook, Theodore, 175-176, 179, 

207, 311 
Hooker, Richard, 84 
Horace, 273 
Houghton, Mary, 308 
Hours in a Library, 146 n. 
House of Fame, The, 112 
House of the Seven Gables, The, 

27, 166 
Howard, John, 181, 312 
Howells, W. D., 48, 265, 299 
Hugo, Victor, 138, 142, 147 
Humble Remonstrance, A, 301, 

305 
Humphry Clinker, 63, 66, 67-68, 

76, 82, 99, 169 
Hunt, Leigh, 158, 163, 311 
Hurd, Richard, 109 
Husband and the Lover, The, 

308 
Hutton, R. H., 313 
Hypatia, 145-146, 310 



Idylls of the King, 2 

Iliad, 44 

Inchbald, Elizabeth, 87, 88, 91, 

306 
Indian Scout, The, 311 
Inferno, Dante's, 159 
Ingelo, Nathaniel, 19 
Inheritance, The, 168-169 
Ireland, S. W. H., 308 



Irving, Washington, 109, 151, 

160, 162, 166, 267, 311 
Italian, The, 104, 105-106, 307 
Ivanhoe, 134, 146, 198, 217, 224 



Jack Brag, 176 

Jack Sheppard, 142 

Jack Wilton, 12 

James, G. P. R., 141, 198, 309 

James, Henry, 48, 97, 263-267, 

268, 299, 301, 305 
Jaiie Eyre, 42, 109, 227, 228-231, 

232, 233, 298, 313 
Janet's Repentance, 238 
Jeffrey, Francis, 126, 129 
John of Gaunt, The Adventures 

of, 112, 308 
Johnson, R. B., 298, 306, 310, 311 
Johnson, Samuel, 40, 77-78, 80, 

81, 121, 205, 305 
Johnson, Samuel, BoswelVs Life 

of, 305 
Johnstone, Charles, 66 
Jonathan Wild, 45, 64, 198 
Jonson, Ben, 24 
Joseph Andrews, 18, 43-45, 47, 

51, 56, 305 
Journal of the Plague Year, 29- 

30 
Jude the Obscure, 272, 274 
Jusserand, Jr^., 302, 303 

K 

Kajiitenbuch, Das, 310 

Kempis, Thomas a, 251 

Kenilworth, 133, 134, 298 

Ker, W. P., 2n. 

Kidnapped, 289 

Kingsley, Charles, 145-146, 157- 

158, 193-194, 214, 219, 299, 310, 

312 
Kingsley, Charles, Letters, and 

Memories of his Life, 310 
Kipling, Rudyard, 290-292, 293, 

294, 298 
Kirkman, Francis, 19 



322 



INDEX 



Knight, Charles, 312 
Knights, The, 308 
Korting, H., 303 
Koran, The, 83 



La Calprenede, Gautier de Costes 
de, 15, 16, 110, 138 

Lad and Lass, 80 

Lady of the Lake (a prose ro- 
mance), 308 

Lady of the Lake (Scott's) , 126 

La Fayette, Mme. de, 15, 17 

Lauder, W. S., 186 

Last Chronicle of Barset, The, 
218, 222 

Last Days of Pompeii, 143, 144 

Last of the Barons, The, 143, 
145, 299 

Last of the Incas, 155, 311 

Last of the Lairds, The, 137 

Last of the Mohicans, The, 152, 
154 

Lathom, Francis, 308 

Latter Day Pamphlets, 312 

Lavengro, 211 

Lawrie Todd, 155 

Lazarillo de Tormes, 9, 12, 301, 
302 

Leather-Stocking Tales, The, 152 

Le Breton, Andre', 303 

Lee, Harriet, 308 

Lee, Sophia, 111, 151, 307, 308 

Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The, 
151 

LeGrys, Sir Robert, 303 

Leibnitz, 81, 188, 189, 199 

Leigh, J. E. Austen-, 309 

Leland, Thomas, 101, 307 

Lennox, Charlotte, 307 

Leopardi, 277 

Lesage, 43, 44, 52, 63 

Lessing, 70 

Lettre a d'Alembert sur les spec- 
tacles, 305 

Lever, Charles, 149, 150, 172, 198, 
199, 310 



Lewes, George Henry, 224, 231, 

232, 313 
Lewis, M. G., 106-107, 159, 307 
Ligeia, 162 
Lillo, Geo., 304 
Lindaniira, a Lady of Quality, 

Letters of, 23 
Lionel Lincoln, 136, 152 
Literary Studies, 309 
Litterature fran<;aise, Manuel de 

la, 303 
Lochandhu, 137 
Locke, John, 61, 84 
Lockhart, J. G., 144, 309 
Lodge, Thomas, 13, 80, 297, 303 
London in the Olden Times, 

136-137 
Longsioord, Earl of Salisbury, 

101, 103, 110, 111, 307 
Looking Backward, 6, 281 
Lopezde Ubeda, 204 
Lord Ormont and his Aminta, 

252 
Lorna Doone, 282, 283 
Lounsbury, T. R., 310 
Lover, Samuel, 172, 311 
Lovers of Provence, The, 4 n. 
Loyalists, The, 308 
Lucian, 10, 43 
Lyly, John, 12-13, 18, 24, 39, 

303 
Lyrical Ballads, The, 238 
Lyttelton, Geo., first Baron, 65 
Lytton, Bulwer-. See Bulwer 

M 

Macaulay, T. B., 73, 217, 224, 290, 

309 
Macbeth, 108, 274 
Mackenzie, Geo., 19 
Mackenzie, Henry, 83, 182 
Mackintosh, James, 312 
MacNeil, Hector, 308 
Madame de Fleury, 96 
Maigron, Louis, 309 
Malory, Sir Thomas, 2, 297, 301 
Man of Feeling, The, 83 



INDEX 



823 



Manley, Mrs. Mary, 20, 65, 110, 

303 
Manley, Mary, Letters loritten 

by, 303 
Manoeuvring , 9(3 
Mansfield Park, 115, 120, 123 
Mansie Wauch, 171, 311 
Manzoni, Alessandro, 138 
Marble Faun, The. 165 
Marcella, 269 
Mare au Liable, La, 80 
Margites (Homer) , 44 
Marianne, 35, 57 
Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de, 35, 

72, 228 
Markheim, 287 
Marriage, 168-169 
Marryat, Frederick, 156-157, 195, 

310 
Marsh-Caldwell, Mrs. Anne, 228 
Martin Chuzzlewit, 189, 190 
Martineau, Harriet, 171 
Martinus Scriblerus, Memoirs 

of, 70-71 
Mary Barton, 194 
Masque of the Red Death, The, 

162 
Master of Ballantrae, The, 282, 

285, 289 
Matthews, Brander, 268, 305 
Maturin, C. R., 159, 161, 162, 

311 
Maxwell, W. H., 149-150, 310 
Melmoth the Wanderer, 159, 311 . 
Memoirs of a Cavalier, 29, 101, 

151 
Memoirs of a Certain Island Ad- 
jacent to Utopia, 20-21 
Memories and Portraits, 301, 305, 

309 
Menander, 262 
Menaphon, 13 
Meredith, Geo., 234, 252-262, 263, 

298, 314 
Merimee, Prosper, 138 
Meyer, Paul, 300, 303 
Microcosmography , 304 



Middlemarch, 238. 243, 244, 246- 

248, 269, 272 
Midshipman Easy, 156 
Midsummer Erie, 308 
Mill, John Stuart, 261 
Mill on the Floss, The, 27, 235, 

238, 240, 242 
Milton, 279 
Minstrel, The, 308 
Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story, 238 
Mitchell, Isaac, 151, 308 
Mitchell, S. Weir, 290 
Mitford, Mary, 171, 311 
Modern Guides of English 

Thought in Matters of Faith, 

313 
Moir, D. M., 168, 171, 311 
Moliere, J. B. P. de, 17, 43, 62, 

58, 262 
Moll Flanders, 29, 204 
Monk, The, 107, 307 
Montalvo, Ordonez de, 7, 12, 301 
Montemayor, George of, 8, 11, 301 
Montford Castle, 308 
Moonstone, The, 281 
Moorland Cottage, The, 235, 238 
More, Hannah, 267 
More, Sir Thomas, 6, 159, 303 
Morel-Fatio, A., 301 
Morier, James, 172, 311 
Morley, Henry, 302 
Morris, WmTr282 
Morte Darthur, 2, 297, 301 
Mosse, Henrietta, 308 
Much Ado about Nothing, 120 
Munday, Anthony, 301 
Murray, Hugh, 308 
My Novel, 209-210 
Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 104- 

105, 116, 307 
Mysterious Freebooter, The, 308 

N 

Nash, Thomas, 12, 302 
Nature and Art, 91, 306 
Nature's Pictures drawn by 
Fancy's Pencil, 303 



324 



INDEX 



Ned Clinton, 137, 149 
Never too Late to Mend, 213 
Neio Atlantis, The, 20 
New Landlord's Tales, 136 
Newcastle, Margaret Duchess of, 

22, 23, 303 
Newcomes, The, 199, 205, 206, 

207 
Newman, J. H., 146, 211 and n. 
Nicholas Nickleby, 183 
Night Thoughts, 40 
Nightmare Abbey, 171 
Nodes AmbrosiansB, 171 
North and South, 194 
Northanger Abbey, 115-116, 117, 

171 
Northumbrian Tale, A, 308 
Notre-Dame de Paris, 138, 142 
Nouvelle mioise. La, 85, 306 
Novel, The : historical and de- 
scriptive definition of, xiii-xv ; 
the novel of incident and the 
novel of character, 26-27 ; re- 
lation to the drama, 57-63 
Novel previous to the xviith Cen- 
tury, A History of the, 300 

O 

(Edipus, the King, 37, 44 

Old Curiosity Shop, The, 183, 

185-186, 189 
Old English Baron, The, 102-103, 

307 
Old Manor House, The, 91 
Old Mortality, 128, 134 
Old Saint Pauls, 143 
Oliver Cromwell, 140 
Oliver Twist, 182-183, 184, 188- 

189, 190 
On State of Criminal Law, 312 
One of our Conquerors, 252 
Opie. Amelia, 88, 90, 306 
Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The, 

252, 298 
Origin of Species, The, 249 
Ormond, 172 
Oroonoko, 20, 46, 84 



Orphan, The, 58 
Otway, Thomas, 58, 304 
Our Village, 171, 311 
Overbury, Thomas, 24 
Ovid, 3 

Owenson, Miss Sydney (Lady 
Morgan) , 172 



Paine, Thomas, 88 

Pair of Blue Eyes, A, 21Z-21^ 

Palace of Pleasure (Painter), 

300 
Palmer, Miss A. T., 308 
Pamela, 22, 31, 32, 33 and n., 35, 

36, 37, 38, 42, 43, 44, 46, 50, 75, 

76, 77, 79, 94, 304 
Pandion and Amphigenia, 19 
Parthenissa, 19 
PartihLP or traits, 265 n., 301 
Pathfinder, The, 152, 154, 298 
Paul Clifford, 182, 188-189, 198, 

312 
Pausanias, 143 
Peacock, T. L., 171, 311 
Peep at Our Ancestors, A, 308 
Peep at the Pilgrims, A, 137 
Peg Woffington, 213 
Pelham, 173-174, 298 
Pen and Ink, 268 n. 
Pendennis, 175, 199, 204, 312 
Pepys, Samuel, 22 
Peregrine Pickle, 63, 65, 66-67 
Persuasion, 115, 120, 122 
Peter Simple, 156 
Phelps, W. L., 307 
Philip, The Adventures of, 199, 

207 
Philosophy of the Short-Story, 

The, 268 n. 
Phiznix, The, 307 
Picara Justina, La, 204 
Picaresque Novel, The, 9-10, 11, 

12, 17-18, 1^20, 28, 44, 57, 63, 

66, 77, 99, 182-183, 189, 203, 212, 

301, 302 
Pickwick Papers, 60, 178-180, 



INDEX 



325 



183, 185, 186, 189, 190, 198, 280, 

311, 312 
Piers Plain, 12, 302 
Pilgrims of the Rhine, 160 
Pilgrim's Progress, 21, 25, 297, 

303 
Pilot, The, 156 
Pioneers, The, 152, 153, 154 
Pirate, The, 155 
Plutarch, 112 
Poe. E. A., 109, 161-163, 164, 165, 

186, 268, 281, 283, 299, 311 
Poetics, Aristotle's, 44 n. 
Polexandre, 16 
Political Justice, 89, 306 
Poor Scholar, The, 172 
Pope, Alexander, 41, 70, 99, 100, 

304 
Popular History of England, 

312 
Porter, AnnaM., 308 
Porter, Jane, 112-113, 126, 307, 

308. 
Portuguese Letters, The, 23, 

304 
Postl, Karl, 310 
Power of Love, in Seven Novels, 

The, 20 
Pownall, Thomas, 308 
Prairie, The, 152, 154 
Prairie Flower, The, 311 
Pr^cieuses ridicules, Les, 17 
Prevost, Abbe', 33 n., 41, 110 
Pride and Prejudice, 84, 115, 119- 

120, 224, 232, 298 
Prince Otto, 282, 287, 288 
Princess of Thule, A, 282 
Princesse de Cleves, La, 17, 25 
Prisoner of Zenda, The, 27 
Professor, The, 227 
Promessi Sposi, I, 138 
Prometheus Unbound, 93 
Prose Fiction, History of, 300, 

303 
Protestant, The, 139 
Provost, The, 170 
Pynson, Richard, 6 



Queenhoo-Hall, 113-114, 308 
Quevedo-Villegas, F. de, 63 

R 

Rabelais, Fran9ois, 43, 69, 70 

Racine, Jean, 58 

Radcliffe, Ann, 104-106, 107, 108, 
109, 126, 158, 159, 163, 225, 307 

Raleigh, Professor Walter, xvi 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 158 

Rambler, The, 77 

Rameses, 136 

Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, 
77-78, 306 

Reade, Charles, 88, 212-215, 216, 
280, 313 

Rebecca and Rowena, 198 

Recess, The, 111, 151, 307 

Keeve, Clara, xiv-xv, 102-103, 
112, 307, 308 

Refugee, The, 137 

Reid, Mayne, 310 

Rejected Addresses, 140 

Repentance, 12 

Return of the Native^ The, 274, 
298 

Reuben Apsley, 140 

Revenge, The, 158 

Revolt of Is2«m, 93 

Reynard the Fox, 5, 9 

Rhoda Fleming, 252 

Richard Caiur de Lion, The Ad- 
ventures of, 112, 308 

Richardson,' Samuel, 3, 8, 16, 21, 
24, 27, 31-42, 43, 46, 49, 50, 57, 
58, 59, 63, 64, 65, 75, 76, 77, 78, 
80, 84, 85, 93, 95, 99, 108, 114, 
187, 188, 205, 228, 236, 266, 279, 
297, 304-305, 306, 307 

Richardson, Samuel, the Corres- 
pondence of, 304, 305 
j Richardson, Rousseau, und 
I Goethe, 305 

Richelieu, 141 
' Rienzi, 143 



326 



INDEX 



Rights of Man, The, 88' 
Rime of Sir Thopas, 4, 300 
Rip Van Winkle, 151 
Ritson, Joseph, 301 
Robert Elsmere, 269 
Robert the Devil, 4 
Robinson, Ralph, 303 
Robinson Crusoe, 22, 27-29, 297, 

304 
Robinson und Robinsonaden, 

304 
Roderick Random, 63, 65, 66, 69, 

155, 156, 297, 305 
Roger de Clarendon, 112, 308 
Rohde, Erwin, 300 
Rojas, Fernando de, 302 
Roman au dix-septieme Steele, 

Le, 303 
Roman bourgeois, Le, 18, 24 
Roman comique, Le, 18 
Roman experimental, Le, 270 )i. 
Roman historique, Le, 309 
Roman naturaliste, Le, 235 7i., 

314 
Romance, The : historical and 

descriptive definition of, xiii- 

XV ; its relation to the epic, 

1-2, 25-26, 300 
Romance of the Forest, The, 104, 

307 
Romance of the Rose, 129 
Romance of War, The, 150 
Romancees, Ancieyit Engleish 

Metrical, 301 
Romances, Early English Prose, 

302 
Romances, Early Prose, 302 
Romances, English Metrical, 

301 
Romances in the Department of 

MSS. in the British Museum, 

Catalogue of, 301 
Romances of Chivalry, 301, 302 
Romances of the West, The, 140 
Romances, Specimens of Early 

English Metrical, 301 
Romania, 3 w., 300 



Romantic Movement, Begin- 
nings of the English, 307 

Romanticism in the Eighteenth 
Century, A History of English, 
307 

Romany Rye, 174 n., 211 

Romola, 238, 242, 243, 244, 245- 

Rookwood, 141-142 

Rosalind, 13, 14, 80, 297 

Rosamond, 87 

Roseteague, 140 

Rougon-Macquart, Les, 270 

Rousseau, J. J., 41, 42, 75, 76, 84, 
85, 86, 87, 88, 257, 270, 305, 306 

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, et les 
origines du cosmopolitisme lit- 
ter aire, 305 

Ruskin, John, 279 

Russeily W. C, 310 

Ruth, 235-237, 238, 244 

S 
St. Clair of the Isles, 308 
St. Irvyne, 107 
St. Ives, 282, 288 
St. Leon, 89-90, 92, 107, 308 
St. Ronan's Well, 131, 171 
Sainte-Beuve, C. A., 17 
Saintsbury, Geo., 127, 305, 306, 

311 
Salut d'amour dans les litt^ra- 

tures provengale et frangaise, 

ie, 303 
Sand, Geo., 80 

Sandford and Merton, 86, 306 
Sandra Belloni, 252, 261 
Sannazaro, Jacopo, 8 
Sayings and Doings, 175-176 
Scarlet Letter, The, 164-165, 166, 

298 
Scarron, Paul, 18, 44 
Scenes from Clerical Life, 238, 

241 
Scenes in Feudal Times, 308 
Schiller, 145 
Schmidt, Erich, 305 



INDEX 



327 



Schopenhauer, 277 

Scott, Mary A., 302 

Scott, Michael, 156, 310 

Scott, Sir Walter, 10, 30, 60, 70, 
84, 91, 101, 104, 109, 110, 111, 
113, 114, 120, 125-130, 137, 138, 
139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 
147, 148, 155, 156, 158, 160, 168, 
169, 171, 179, 182, 183, 187, 188, 
190, 198, 201, 205, 209, 211, 224, 
243, 280, 283, 288, 28'.), 290, 292, 
293, 298, 299, 304, 307, :309 

Scott, Sir Walter, Journal of, 309 

Scott, Sir Walter, Life of, 309 

Scottish Adventurers, The, 308 

Scottish Chiefs, The, 113, 308 

Scuderi, Madeleine de, 15-17, 19, 
21, 35, 254, 303 

Sealsfield, Charles. See Postl, 
Karl 

Secret History of Queen Zarah 
and the Zarazlans, The, 20 

Secret Intrigues of the Court of 
Caramania, 20-21 

Self, 311 

Senior, Henry, 195 

Sense and Sensibility, 115, 116- 
117 

Sentimental Journey, A, 69, 75- 
76, 108 

Sephora, 137 

Sermons to Young Women, 86 

Seventeenth Century Studies, 303 

Shakespeare, 8, 13, 43, 48, 58, 60, 
62, 108, 110, 119, 120, 126, 132, 
133, 134, 143, 160, 164, 205, 221, 
224, 226, 237, 251, 274, 279, 288, 
309 

Shakespeare Jest-Books, 302 

Shaving of Shagpat, The, 252 

Shelley, Mary, 108, 158, 307 

Shelley, P. B., 93, 107-108, 158, 
161, 307 

Sheridan, Frances, 78 

Sheridan, R. B., 78 

Sherlock Holmes, 281 

Sherwood Forest, 308 



Shirley, 227, 231-232, 233 

Shorter, C. K., 313 

Sicilian Romance, A, 104 

Sidney, Sir Philip, 11, 13, 18, 25 

Silas '3Iarner, 238, 240, 249 

Simms, W. G., 310 

Simple Story, A, 87 

Sir Charles Grandison, 16, 32, 33, 
^, 35, 36, 37, 41, 228, 304 

Sir Launcelot Greaves, The Ad- 
ventures of, 63 

Sketches by Boz, 191 

Small House at Allington, The, 
218 

Smith, Charlotte, 88, 90, 91, ;306 

Smith, Goldwin, 309 

Smith, Horace, 140, 309 

Smollett, Tobias, 9, 10, 45, 63-69, 
71, 72, 73, 76, 78, 84, 97, 99-101, 
102, 112, 135, 144, 155, 156, 179, 
191, 209, 240, 285, 297, 305 

Sociable Letters, CCXI, 23, 303 

Social Contract, The, 88 

Social England, 312 

Son of Ethelwulf, The, 308 

Sophocles, 41, 143 

Sorel, Charles, 17, 18, 63 

Southey, Robert, 139, 159, 301 

Spanish Fiction, History of, 301 

Spectator, The, 24-25, 147, 304 

Spenser, Edmund, 14, 108, 109, 
147, 165 

Spirit of the Age, The, 306 

Spy, The, 151-152 

Stael, Mme. de, 172 

State of the Prisons in England 
and Wales, 312 

Steele, Richard, 24-25, 28 n., 37, 
52, 58, 147, 205, 206, 304 

Stephen, Leslie, 146, 304 

Sterne, Laurence, 10, 69-76, 79- 
80, 81, 83, 108, 130, 186, 205, 
206, 209, 210, 212, 253, 258, 259, 
293, 297, 306 

Sterne, Illustrations of, 69, 306 

Stevenson, R. L., 30, 282-289, 292, 
298, 301, 305, 309 



328 



INDEX 



Stories of Waterloo, 149, 310 
Stowe, H. B., 195-196, 312 
Stowe, H. B., Life of, 312 
Strutt, Joseph, 113-114, 308 
Studies in Literature, 313 
Studies of the Stage, 305 
Subaltern, The, 149 
Suckling, Sir John, 55 
Sue, Eugene, 156 
Suden und Norden, 310 
Suicide Club, The, 288 
Swift, Jonathan, 30, 41, 43, 65, 70, 

304 
Swiss Emigrants, The, 308 
Sybil, 193 

Synnove Solbakken, 80 
Systeme de la nature, 88 
Systenie de politique positive, 

243-244 



Taine, H. A., 249 

Tale for a Chimney Corner, A, 
163, 311 

Tale of Two Cities, The, 188 

Tales of a Traveller, 160, 311 

Tasso, Torquato, 10 

Tennyson, Alfred, 2, 33 n. 

Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 274- 
279, 280 

Texte, Joseph, 305 

Thackeray, W. M., 10, 139, 141, 
14(>-148, 157, 159, 176, 196, 
197-208, 209, 210, 211, 215, 216, 
217, 225, 226, 230, 236, 239, 241, 
254, 258, 259, 272, 290, 298, 312, 
313 

Thackeray, Life of, 313 

Thaddeus of Warsaio, 113, 308 

Theagenes and Chariclea, 26 n., 
302 

Thomas Fitzgerald, 136 

Thomas of Reading, 12 

Thorns, W. J., 302 

Thomson, James, 47 

Thdroddsen, Jon, 80 

Three Studies in Literature, 211 n. 



Ticknor, Geo., 301 
Tieck, Ludwig, 160, 166 
To the True Romance, 291 
Tom and Jerry, 176-177, 178, 312 
Tom. Burke of Ours, 150 
Tom Cringle's Log, 156, 310 
Tom Jones, 18, 45-54, 55, 56, 57, 

62, 63, 64, 82, 92, 93, 204, 224, 

297, 305 
Tor Hill, The, 140 
Tower of London, The, 143 
Tragic Comedians, The, 252 
Tragic Muse, The, 265, 267, 305 
Traill, H. D., 312 
Traits and Stories of the Irish 

Peasantry, 172, 311 
Treasure Island, 283, 285, 298 
Treasure of Franchard, The, 287 
Trelawny of Trelawne, 140 
Trevisa,.John of, 226 
Tristram Shandy, 69, 70-75, 297 
Troilus and Cressida, 6, 25, 301 
Trojel, E., 301 
Trollope, Anthony, 196, 215-224, 

233, 236, 255, 298, 313 
Troy : romances of, 1 
Turgenev, Ivan, 264 
Twenty-ninth of May, The, 137 

U 

Uncle Tom's Cabin, 20, 195-196, 

213, 312 
Underdown, Thomas, 26 n., 302 
Urfe', Honore d', 303 
Utopia, 6, 14, 84, 303 



Vanbrugh, Sir John, 46 

Vanity Fair, 199-204, 205, 207, 

230, 298 
Vanity of Human Wishes, 78 
Vathek, 103-104, 307 
Vergil, 8, 26 
Vicar of Wakefield, The, 78-81, 

297, 306 
Vigny, Alfred de, 138 
Villette, 227. 232-233 



INDEX 



329 



Villon, Fran9ois, 287 
Vindication of the Rights of 

Woman, 306 
Virginians, The, 146, 199, 205, 

206, 207 
Vittoria, 252 
Vivian, 96 

Vivian Grey, 172-173 
Voltaire, 42, 70, 103, 189 

W 

Walladmor, 137 

Walpole, Horace, 101-103, 163 

Walton, Izaak, 22 

Warbeck, 307 

Ward, H. L. D., 301 

Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 268-270 

Warden, The, 218 

Warleigh, 140 

Warren, F. M., 300 

Watson, John, 171, 290 

Watts, H. E., 301 

Waverley, 82, 126-127, 129, 130, 

158, 168, 179, 243, 298, 307, 309 
Way, G. L., 301 
Weber, H. W., 301 
Wesley, John, 49 
West, Jane, 308 
Westward Ho! 157-158, 299 
Weyman, Stanley J., 289 
Whately, Richard, Archbishop 

309 
Whipple, E. P., 313 



White, James, 112, 308 

Wieland, 107 

Wildfell Hall, 228 

Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 

61 n., 305 
Will o' the Mill, 288 
William Douglas, 137 
William of Normandy, 307-308 
Wilmot, R. H., 308 
Windsor Castle, 143 
Wister, Owen, 155, 310 
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 84, 90, 306 
Woman in White, The, 281 
Woodstock, 129, 140 
Worde, Wynkyn de, 6 
Wordsworth, Wm., 223, 238, 242, 

251, 269, 276 
Wuthering Heights, 166-167, 228 
Wyclif, John, 5 



Xenophon, 32 

Y 

Yeast, 194 

Yong, Bartholomew, 301 

Young, Edward, 40-41 



Zanoni, 160-161 

Zastrozzi^\QR 

Zola, :^mile, 18, 270-272 



THREE STUDIES IN 
LITERATURE. 



BY 



LEWIS EDWARDS GATES, 

Assistant Professor of English in Harvard University, 

Cloth. i2mo. $1.50. 



FRANCIS JEFFREY. ASPECTS OF THE 

CARDINAL NEWMAN. ROMANTIC PERIOD OF 

MATTHEW ARNOLD. ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



" Professor Gates is fortunate in his subjects ; his 
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viewer, the spiritual rhetorician, the humanistic critic. 
These masterly Studies should be in the hands of 
all students of our literature in this century." 

— Outlook. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 



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